We are a proud sponsor of CodepaLOUsa again this year and are looking forward to hosting 58 guest speakers covering almost 70 breakout sessions. Tickets are going fast, so head on over and get yours while you can. If you are interested in sponsoring, let me know.

Also, a big shout to Jay Garmon at Louisville Digital Association for helping us get the word out to his audience.

The right way is to listen and have an unloaded conversation to gain some trust. EVERYONE in the room already knows there are a million ideas represented…that’s why they all came. Take your time in conversation…if the person is receptive in unloaded conversation, the ASK will eventually come…they will say “what do you do”? Let them lead, it’s the only way they will listen. People’s BS meters are getting more refined with each meeting they take and the instance you make the conversation about YOU, the BS meter will go off and you’ve lost them. Creating opportunities takes time…very rarely does it fall in your lap. Business is built on relationships and those don’t form overnight.

*I originally posted this on my personal site and realized that the igNew readers might benefit as well. I modified it slightly to speak to a larger audience.

Fortunately, there’s another way to get faster without extra mistakes, and that’s efficiency. Efficiency accomplishes more while doing less; you naturally take less time to do things, rather than rushing to complete something in less time than you’d normally take. Make sense? No? Well, regardless, here are nine ways to get more efficient with your programming routine.

1) Clean up your toolset.

The very first step towards efficiency is getting rid of that which is superfluous. Zip through your Add/Remove programs list and take inventory of what you find. Do you really need it? If you haven’t used a piece of software in well over a month, chances are pretty good it can go away forever. What about your desktop? Is it clean and easy to use, or is half the screen taken up by icons? The time spent hunting through your desktop for a document could probably be used double-clicking a folder instead, and it’s certainly better for your sanity. What about your tools themselves? Do you have a bloated piece of software with a billion functions that takes forever to load, of which you typically only use one anyway? Check if there’s a lighter-weight alternative available through a site like AlternativeTo.Net. In general, your tools ought to do one thing, and do it well. If they have multiple functions, they ought to be closely clustered in theme and generally useful. Keep it light, keep it simple!

2) Do one thing at a time.

A Zen proverb: “When walking, walk. When eating, eat.”

Multitasking is good for computers, not so much for human beings. It may feel like you’re getting more done, but often times, you’d work faster through a queue focusing on one item at a time. Admittedly, it’s not realistic to always be doing one thing and one thing only, but limiting the amount of simultaneous tasks will go a long way towards productivity. An excellent way to facilitate this is adopting an Agile work environment, like the one used at IgNew. You’ll be amazed how much more you get done when you’re not constantly interrupted by two different things while in the middle of a third.

3) Increase your WPM.

Most programmers have been working with computers so long that their WPM is already ridiculous, so this is often unnecessary. Still, anything that increases typing speed will increase how fast you can comfortably get the code out of your brain and onto the screen. Take 5 minute typing lesson breaks with your favorite software or website. Learn a musical instrument to increase finger dexterity. (Piano or guitar is especially good for this.) At the extreme end, you can even learn how to type on a Dvorak keyboard, where the keys are laid out such that the most common letters in the English language are on the home row.

4) Learn Vi.

I can already hear the groans. Vi may seem arcane and unfriendly, but just a few weeks’ training will save a ridiculous amount of keystrokes, and that translates to faster editing. GVim is available for Windows, and a VsVim plugin is available for Visual Studio 2010. If nothing else, learn how to use Vi’s global regex functions; if you’ve ever had to hunt and peck for specific-but-not-all instances of a word, you’ll quickly recognize how useful it is. Which brings us to…

5) Learn Regex.

If you do a lot of text manipulation, regex can perform miracles for your code. Need to parse or validate a string? Regex. Split and replace? Regex. Word wrap lines to a max of 80 characters without breaking in the middle of a word? Yep, regex. Not only that, but regex can be precompiled in just about any language, just sitting there waiting to operate on your string with maximum efficiency. And don’t just learn the easy operators—everyone knows *, +, and .—but the semi-obscure ones, such as ^ (start of line), $ (end of line), {#} (repetition), and how to group results and reference them later. The more you can do in one line of regex, the better off you are.

6) Enable mouse gestures on your browser.

Mouse gestures allow you to hold down a mouse button (usually the right button) and draw a unique pattern on the screen that triggers an action. At its simplest, it turns “Back” and “Forward” on your browser into a gesture like flipping a page. Just setting up gestures for “back,” “close,” and “switch tabs” will speed things up fairly dramatically. The options are too numerous to mention here, but one particular standout is SmoothGestures for Chrome—and, of course, mouse gestures are already built in to Opera.

7) Learn keyboard shortcuts.

Just about everyone knows about the “Cool Switch” (Alt-Tab) to rapidly switch between programs. But did you know about Windows-Break to pull up the System panel? How about Ctrl-Tab, to switch between tabs in a window? Windows-E to bring up a file window? There are a lot of one-shot keyboard shortcuts to do things that normally take a lot of dragging and clicking through menus with a mouse. Windows 7, in particular, nearly doubled the amount of keyboard shortcuts available. You can find the full list for Windows 7 here.

8) Set up a key macro program.

It speaks for itself, but you’ll save time launching your best programs with a flip of your fingers instead of hunting through menus or searching for icons. For ease of use, I recommend HotKeyBind; its setup menus allow you to quickly and easily bind your favorite programs or functions to a single keystroke. The gold standard in keyboard macros, however, is AutoHotKey. A little time learning its scripting language will allow you to make any window dance at your command.

9) Learn and employ best coding practices.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In the face of adversity, it may seem tempting to jam in a hack and move on with life, but it will come back to bite you—maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually. And then, all the time you saved will be squandered figuring out why you did what you did and why it doesn’t work this time. Best coding practices are there to protect you. When in doubt, ask yourself if something could be done in a more elegant way. Get someone more experienced than you to review your code. Take a little extra time to do it right, and you’ll never have to look at it again. (At least, not until the client wants it changed!)

A lot of this may seem superfluous or even obvious, but becoming more efficient is a slow, quiet process. One day, you’ll simply look up and notice you’re faster than everyone else, and you may not even know why. The next time you sit down to code, notice how often these techniques would apply to you, and I think you’ll be surprised.

But if nothing else, stop hustling! If you catch the ball the first time, you don’t have to dive for it later.