In the The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks highlights an eye opening disparity in productivity between good and poor programmers (emphasis mine). Programming managers have long recognized wide productivity variations between good programmers and poor ones. But the actual measured magnitudes have astounded all of us. In one of their studies, Sackman, Erickson, and Grant were measuring performance of a group of experienced programmers. Within just this group the ratios between the best and worst performances averaged about 10:1 on productivity measurements and an amazing 5:1 on program speed and space measurements! Robert Glass cites research that puts this...
Update: I have an even better startlet for stopping and starting services in my comments.
If you’re running Vista, run, don’t walk, and go download and install Start++ (thanks to Omar Shahine for turning me on to this). Make it the first thing you do. Many thanks to Brandon Paddock who developed this nice little tool. He describes the tool in this post.
I have a message for Start++ from the Start menu. “You complete me!”.
Ok, terribly corny jokes aside, it’s the little things that save me lots of time in the long run. For example, starting and stopping SQL server is kind...