What are the Best Secrets of Great Programmers?

The best secret I learned from a great programmer: Pay to Win.

It’s also good to Play to Win (which means building your own tools and libraries to accelerate your work), but committing to paying in the right places.

The first lesson I learned was how he used to spend his afternoons working from a Starbucks via a remote desktop to his office machine that would then compile code via a server farm. This was in the late 00s, but even then the connection was good enough.

Firstly, the bare minimum — I’m subscribed to:

1. Jetbrains (for access to the very best IDEs available).
2. Adobe (so that I can open Illustrator and Photoshop files if I ever need to, and whenever I need to edit videos).
3. Spotify and TIDAL (for the best in background ambience). Not specific to programming, but thought I’d mention it.
4. Medium (it pays writers and gets me access to the best Data Science articles).

HP Instant Ink (you’d be surprised how much more...