Marc G Gauthier writes about engineering management, one-on-one meetings, productivity, and developer topics like Vim setup.
HN commenters recommend his one-on-one openers post as a source of good questions, and his posts come up on productivity and Vim.
How did we end up in this mess?
Back in the early 2000s, innovation in software development was booming. IDEs actually helped you build stuff. You had Visual Component Libraries, drag and drop interfaces, proper GUIs. Visual Basic, Delphi, .NET and the one and only Xcode. When I read about these tools or watch videos, it feels like toolmakers were on fire.
https://marcgg.com/blog/2024/01/05/editor-history/
And then web development came along, and it was like big tech companies hit the reset button.
We went from powerful visual environments to Notepad++. From proper tooling to writing jQuery by hand and praying it didn't break somewhere else.
FrontPage. Dreamweaver. Director. Flash! Say what you want, but at least they tried to give developers a proper workflow. Then Facebook ditched all of it for the purity of the web and pretended that coding everything by hand was somehow noble.
Facebook dropped the bar so low that anything remotely decent, like Sublime Text or Atom felt revolutionary. And Visual Studio? It's called Visual but where are the visual components? Why do devs have to write React components by hand in 2025?
Apple gave us Xcode. Microsoft gave us Visual Basic and .NET. Adobe gave us Director and Flash. Google gave us Chrome and Android Studio. And Facebook gave us a bunch of text files called React... and a massive headache.
What happened to building tools that make developers more productive? Web developers had to wait 20 years for a new wave of…
We've seen Peak, and it's encouraging that there are others in the automated productivity space. There are a few major differences between us and them, however:
Peak focuses on the individual. We focus on the team. There was an excellent article today (http://marcgg.com/blog/2013/11/12/peak-productivity/) discussing the issue with ranking team members based on their output, especially when information is far from complete. We're trying to boost productivity by demonstrating momentum, instead of by micromanaging individual players.
We are not a destination site; we're a passive email that does not interrupt anyone's workflow. Just check your email (on the phone, even) and you'll know what's going on with your team -- you don't have to keep a tab open and keep checking back to find out what's going on.
Finally, we're engineers, not a design firm. We move and ship very fast. We will respond to changes in user needs and behavior instantly, releasing/changing/removing features and applications as necessary.
See also `:h defaults.vim-explained` (https://vimhelp.org/usr_05.txt.html#05.3) which now comes by default.
You can either copy the settings you are interested in or source it entirely in your vimrc file:
source $VIMRUNTIME/defaults.vim
---
Here's some more related resource links:
* stackoverflow: useful .vimrc tips - (https://stackoverflow.com/q/164847/4082052)
* vi.stackexchange: How do I debug my vimrc file? - (https://vi.stackexchange.com/q/2003/1616)
* vim-sensible - (https://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible)
* minimal vimrc for new users - (https://gist.github.com/benmccormick/4e4bc44d8135cfc43fc3)
* Vim Configuration From Scratch - (https://marcgg.com/blog/2016/03/01/vimrc-example)
* vimconfig: generate `.vimrc` by selecting options - (https://vimconfig.com/)
It's not that hard, it's just a matter of saving some time on weekends for instance.
If you don't have a lot of hours to put into them, just reduce the scope and do something you can complete in a few evenings / nights. Then if you're happy with it, you can iterate and get a real product out of it.
I elaborated more on the subject on my blog a few months back if you're interested: http://marcgg.com/2012/01/09/start-working-on-your-side-project/
A great one-on-one begins with good questions. This post gives some great hints.
https://marcgg.com/blog/2019/11/30/one-on-one-openers/