Productivity tools for developers

Picks a Git branching approach for my team size and release rhythm, with the trade-offs and the first three rules to write down.

Chooses up to five team-level delivery metrics for a stated goal, with how to read each one and how it could be gamed or misused.

Designs a daily routine of focus blocks around your meetings and interruptions, with a start ritual, a break rule and a weekly check.

Plans a local development setup a new teammate can start with one command, in numbered steps with a check after each one.

Plans how to develop on a remote machine over SSH, in numbered steps with a check per step and the security habits to keep.

Plans a dependency update in small batches from your outdated list, with the risky packages isolated and a rollback step for each batch.

Plans a four-week routine to learn the editor shortcuts that save you the most time, five minutes a day, starting from what you do by mouse.

Plans a sprint from a pasted backlog and my team capacity, with a ranked scope, named risks and one item to cut first.

Plans a screen and window layout for your daily development work, with one layout per task type and the shortcuts to switch between them.

Plans five starter alerts for a service, each with what it measures, a threshold to tune and who gets paged, to avoid alert fatigue.

Plans a four-week order for learning the IDE features that save the most time for my kind of work, one small exercise each.

Ranks my manual test cases by value and effort to automate, and plans the first two weeks of building a reliable automated suite.