One trick to speed up programming is to make sure that you can iterate on code as fast as possible. I've created a little tool that has helped me iterate faster called zing.

zing works by letting me create a script called .zing in any directory. I put in there whatever command I happen to want to run repeatedly. For some projects, I can just have it be rake test, but the content varies a lot. It might be testing a certain request with a cURL script that I exported from chromium's developer tools, or it could just focus on a single test in the test suite.

I tend to change the content of the script throughout the day while working on a project, which is where I think it wins out over other techniques.

I have this mapped to a special key combination, ,z in vim, in both Insert and Normal modes. When I hit that combination, the file is automatically saved and the command is run. I then hit enter and continue programming.

I will now publish this blog post by pressing ,z, which runs the following .zing script, located in ../.zing:

#!/bin/bash -e
jekyll build --destination /tmp/jekyll-blog/
rsync -aP --del /tmp/jekyll-blog/ webserver:www/blog/

Installation instructions are available on github.