Efficient ways to mantain systems and operations

Question

What are the important methods, ways, tools have you learnt that make a big difference in your work or life? 1. software, 2. lemmas of math, 3. clean ways of maintain and tracing documents, or 4. effective recipes to strong project management 5. tools that make a great difference, eg, logmein, aescrypt, etc 6. webpages that make a grand difference, eg. mathworks central, etc 7. life-steering advices from veteran engineers, eg. my mentor once said "what is hard to code must be hard to debug". I adopt this principle in life as well.

Please share the specifics.

Answer 1

I can tell you of a few things that made my work as a software developer easier:

• Software version control systems (VCS). No more mind-breaking "what did I change yesterday that broke this today?" day-long quests.

• Document management systems (DMS). No more "damn, I changed the previous version of the manual" bumps on the road. A VCS can ocasionally provide some of the functionality of a DMS, but it's not as straight-forward.

• Software for collaborative issue-tracking and task management. Often, this also doubles as an organised note-taking tool for specific issues. It keeps all information on each task/problem in the same location.

• VPN software - sometimes working from home can be nice - as long as you take care to not let work take over your life.

• Organised software engineering e.g. the model-driven approach for design, unit testing for testing etc. No more (well, maybe just less) forging ahead into code with no design in mind or floundering about with debugging.

• StackOverflow for providing easy and organised access to the experts around the world.