Blog|From the Stashpad team & community
productivity
How to prioritize your work as a developer
The right priorities will help you navigate uncertainty and be fulfilled at work
Jonathan Bender|January 4, 2023
productivity
Get things done
3 productivity methodologies that start with capturing ideas
Jonathan Bender|November 9, 2022
teams
Spikes are your answer to open-ended questions
Time sucks loom with every blink of your cursor. A big new feature with unclear parameters. A sticky technical question that stops your progress.
Jonathan Bender|October 21, 2022
productivity
My top 5 WebStorm shortcuts
Give your Webstorm workflow a boost with these shortcuts
Tristan Dyer|October 18, 2022
productivity
Attention residue is eroding your focus
When you hop on back-to-back Zoom calls, ever feel like your brain is still hung up on the last conversation? Of course you do. You’re a developer.
Jonathan Bender|October 6, 2022
teams
Code review culture
Code reviews might feel like bumper-to-bumper traffic on your morning commute. You’re stuck. You just need to get through it in order to get to your destination.
Jonathan Bender|September 23, 2022
productivity
A deep dive into flow
Every once in a while, it’s just you and a screen. The rapid click of keys. The beat in your headphones. The joy of uninterrupted work.
Jonathan Bender|September 13, 2022
productivity
When to prioritize code quality at a startup
You've launched or released a major new feature. But there's still all of the code that’s hard to work with because it needs rearchitecting.
Jonathan Bender|August 30, 2022
news
Introducing Stashpad
Today, we're excited to announce our name change from Bytebase to Stashpad. In our new name, we wanted to better communicate what the tool is and what it enables you to do: Stashpad is a new kind of developer scratchpad that makes it easy to stash your thoughts and notes without breaking your flow.
Cara Borenstein|August 1, 2022
work
Setting slack status for remote work
In the office, it’s pretty obvious when your colleague is in Deep Work. You look over and see that she’s deep in some code. She’s in the zone, with her eyes glued to the screen. If your question isn’t urgent, you save it for later. If it’s urgent, you interrupt and get all hands on deck.
Cara Borenstein|July 21, 2022
productivity
Planned Group Brainstorming
The right idea is out there. Sometimes it’s right in front of you. More often it’s not. Plucking the right idea out of the swirl of ideas is hard. Especially if you’re trying to look for solutions with your entire team. So, how do you go from chaos to clarity?
Jonathan Bender|June 21, 2022
productivity
Find Meaning In The Gritty Work
It’s human nature to shy away from the things that we don’t like doing and to avoid the gritty work. That doesn’t change the fact that the work still needs to get done and it needs to get done well.
Jonathan Bender|June 6, 2022
productivity
How we minimize deep work interruptions at Stashpad
Nobody sets out to have an entire day of meetings. But then your team doubles. Half your engineers are working remotely. And you wake up to discover your calendar is completely blocked off before you’ve even sat down at your keyboard.
Jonathan Bender|May 16, 2022
productivity
Why the pomodoro method is more useful than you might think
The Pomodoro Method is a productivity technique where you chunk your time into 30 minutes blocks and allocate 25 minutes for focused time and 5 minutes for break. Each 30-minute block is called a “Pomodoro.”
Evan Fleischer|March 7, 2022
work
Embrace the reality of zoom meetings and make them work for you
Do you sigh when your email dings with another meeting request? You’re not alone. A recent Pew Research study showed that 40 percent of people feel “fatigued or worn out” from video conferencing. Even Zoom’s CEO Eric Yuan hit the wall with meetings. In Yuan’s defense, it took 19 meetings in a single day to break him. Your breaking point likely arrived a lot sooner.
Jonathan Bender|January 31, 2022
productivity
You probably don't need a knowledge garden
When it comes to taking notes, we often find ourselves attempting to build a wiki-style knowledge base, knowledge graph, digital garden, or similar. While these aren’t all the same thing, there is a common denominator: the idea that we consistently document knowledge in an organized way so that we can revisit it and benefit from it over time. Let’s call this concept a “knowledge garden”.
Theo Marin|January 13, 2022
work
5 strategies for self-care when working from home
Any time my back starts bothering me, and my usual stretches don’t work, I call my brother. He’s a progressive chiropractor in San Jose, so he sees a lot of people working in tech. His latest horror story was about a 30-year-old patient with a particularly demanding employer. “They’re spending 15 or 16 hours at their desk a day, so it’s very hard on their bodies,” he says. She was worried her mid-back pain and bad posture might leave her with a permanently curved spine.
Maria Hunt|December 8, 2021
work
How to maximize deep work when working remotely
Working remotely offers plenty of benefits. Goodbye, commute. Hello, ergonomic chair. But, it also brings unexpected obstacles to finding your flow. The world and everyone else from your office likely keep clamoring for your attention like a toddler interrupting a live television interview. So, how do you maximize your time in Deep Work while working remotely?
Jonathan Bender|November 18, 2021
productivity
Status dumps for software engineers
A Status Dump is a brief timestamped summary that covers where you’re up to and what’s next. It also includes any blockers or questions that will need to be addressed to move forward.
Cara Borenstein|June 22, 2021