Before rolling your eyes midway through the article, make sure to read the notes below
1. Experts type really fast
They never look at the keys of their keyboards, many of them use blank keycaps. True experts sometimes loose ability to type common words that have similar technical identifiers, e.g. typing “reach” is a challenge for expert React developers.
2. Experts use keyboard shortcuts
Click, click, click, this is too slow. You will never see an expert save their file using File → Save menu commands, it’s always ⌘S. Same goes for navigating the code, moving cursor, opening tabs.
3. Experts have multiple tabs open
Be it Chrome, terminal or code editors, experts always keep a lot of open tabs within each app. It helps them parallelize the work.
4. Experts use longer names
The median length of variable of the expert developer is typically 11.2 characters. The extra time it takes to type the variable names is very well compensated by skill #1.
5. Experts prefer dark themes
You know you are looking at 10x developer’s monitor if everything is really dark. Experts switch their OS (which is, of course, macOS) theme to dark, use dark editor and terminal themes.
They also heavily customize their environments, change wallpapers, etc.
6. Experts wear hoodies
Formal shirts you see in business and finance is not a good sign. The best of the best usually wear comfortable closes: T-shirts, jeans, Allbirds, hoodies.
7. Experts read Hacker News
Hacker News is a great source of technical buzz. Hot new startups, programming language benchmarks, Electron hate speech, and, of course, Rust. Discussions on this website are often more useful than the posted content itself.
Conclusions
To become an expert 10x developer, learn to type fast, print shortcuts cheat sheet, prefix all your identifiers with your name, get some comfy closes, switch to dark mode and open as many articles from Hacker News in your browser tabs as can fit in your RAM.
When I was in school, a friend of mine tried a bold but dumb strategy that I remember to this day. He wanted to improve his scores, so he totally emulated the smartest guy in our class: got similar closes, ate the same food, got the same pens, sat in the same way. The outcome wasn’t the same though.
While it’s entertaining to read best sellers and random marketing materials, keep in mind that the observed traits are not why people are great. They are great because they have worked their asses off and have overwhelming loads of experience that form their personalities. You can ask an expert 10x developer to work without using the traits from this article, and they will still be 10x better than you.
