Flow
I was recently thinking about why I love ReSharper so much, and the biggest reason came down to achieving flow. It’s amazing the productivity and the enjoyment that come out of being put in an energetic and focused mindset.
The components of flow (from WikiPedia / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) are:
- We are up to the activity.
- We are able to concentrate on the activity.
- The activity has clear goals.
- The activity has direct feedback.
- We feel that we control the activity.
- Our worries and concerns disappear.
- Our subjective experience of time is altered.
Although ReSharper doesn’t provide all of this directly, it’s the glue that tends brings my IDE experience together.
March 8th, 2006 at 3:36 am
Ben, we still use resharper here at your old gig. The solution has grown and grown to the point that resharper causes some pretty serious delays during the coding process. With our solution (13 projects, 5500 files and about 100meg) it disrupts ‘flow’ with ponderous pauses during typing and cache loads during startup. Our machines are 2.8gHz and 1 Gig RAM. Now I see a split where some developers actually turn off resharper, while others like me still use it.
March 8th, 2006 at 3:36 am
Ouch. I haven’t seen that happen yet to the extent that you’re talking about. I can see where the flow goes away when you’re waiting for the cache loads that take a long time. Hopefully this will be addressed in the next version. Has anyone contacted the JetBrains crew? I’m sure they would like to hear how they could fix this.