Productive coding

Dr. Heinz Kabutz, author of the Java Specialist Newsletter is talking to us about coding productivity and about using the IDE ad your tools effectively. This is also something I have been thinking a lot about since I am often in a position where I do pair programming and coaching. Then you tend to notice how other people work, if they use keyboard shortcuts, how they navigate and so on.

being able to use the IDE effectively, especially using keyboard shortcuts is really a differentiating factor in productivity. How fast you type, and if you use touch or not may also be a factor, because we still think faster than we type.

Important to actually make sure that you know what code you actually need, which code gets executed in production. Important, since most money goes into maintenance and you don't want to maintain unused code.

Heinz also talks about how he has mate this doclet that finds this and that like unused methods fields and so on. I use IDEA to locate stuff like this intead of running a doclet.
More discussions on exception handling, increasing tghe use of private/protected scoping and so on. Many developers should read up about this, resonable scoping will make your class easier to use and less confusing and actually reduce the chance of anything being duplicated if the api uses a reasonable naming strategy and relevant javadoc where needed. Still Heninz has not told me anything that I am not allready aware of, except for for a couple of funny comments in the J2SE core awt code and how the actual enforcements access to final fields as changed back and forth from 1.1 to 1.6.