I really enjoyed Sam Saffron's post about eliminating trivial inconveniences in his development process. This resonated with me as I tend to get really distracted by minor hiccups in the development process (page reload taking >2 seconds, switch to a new tab, etc). I took a look at my development process and found a few easy wins.

Automatically run the unit tests in the current file

Twilio's PHP test suite are really slow - we're sloppy about trying to have unit tests avoid hitting the disk, which means that the suite takes a while to run. I wrote a short vim command that will run only the tests in the current file. This tends to make the test iteration loop much, much faster and I can run the entire suite of tests once the current file is passing. The <leader> function in Vim is excellent and I recommend you become familiar with it.

nnoremap <leader>n :execute "!" . "/usr/local/bin/phpunit " . bufname('%') . ' \| grep -v Configuration \| egrep -v "^$" '<CR>

bufname('%') is the file name of the current Vim buffer, and the last two commands are just grepping away output I don't care about. The result is awesome:

Auto reloading the current tab when you change CSS

Sam has a pretty excellent MessageBus option that listens for changes to CSS files, and auto-refreshes a tab when this happens. We don't have anything that good yet but I added a vim leader command to refresh the current page in the browser. By the time I switch from Vim to Chrome (or no time, if I'm viewing them side by side), the page is reloaded.

function! ReloadChrome()
    execute 'silent !osascript ' . 
                \'-e "tell application \"Google Chrome\" " ' .
                \'-e "repeat with i from 1 to (count every window)" ' .
                \'-e "tell active tab of window i" ' . 
                \'-e "reload" ' .
                \'-e "end tell" ' .
                \'-e "end repeat" ' .
                \'-e "end tell" >/dev/null'
endfunction

nnoremap <leader>o :call ReloadChrome()<CR>:pwd<cr>

Then I just hit <leader>o and Chrome reloads the current tab. This works even if you have the "Developer Tools" open as a separate window, and focused - it reloads the open tab in every window of Chrome.

Pushing the current git branch to origin

It turns out that the majority of my git pushes are just pushing the current git branch to origin. So instead of typing git push origin <branch-name> 100 times a day I added this to my .zshrc:

    push_branch() {
        branch=$(git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name --abbrev-ref HEAD)
        git push $1 $branch
    }
    autoload push_branch
    alias gpob='push_branch origin'

I use this for git pushes almost exclusively now.

Auto reloading our API locally

The Twilio API is based on the open-source flask-restful project, running behind uWSGI. One problem we had was changes to the application code would require a full uWSGI restart, which made local development a pain. Until recently, it was pretty difficult to get new Python code running in uWSGI besides doing a manual reload - you had to implement a file watcher yourself, and then communicate to the running process. But last year uWSGI enabled the py-auto-reload feature, where uWSGI will poll for changes in your application and automatically reload itself. Enable it in your uWSGI config with

py-auto-reload = 1   # 1 second between polls

Or at the command line with uwsgi --py-auto-reload=1.

Conclusion

These changes have all made me a little bit quicker, and helped me learn more about the tools I use on a day to day basis. Hope they're useful to you as well!

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