Check the academic version of this post.

4 months ago we’ve released a Chrome extension to help developers track how they use the web and be more productive. From December 2014 to April 2015 we accumulated many hours of activity from our community. We have taken a sample of a little more than 30,000 hours of the browsing activity, cleaned up the data, analyze the patterns that arise and put it all together to show you what we’ve found.

We randomly selected from our dataset +160 users with development high activity and also the Chrome extension activated on the timeframe between December 2014 and April 2015. We clustered our sample based on the behavior of the Codealike Focus Level KPI and selected the upper quartile as our highly focused individuals and moved from there into analyzing the browsing patterns.

If you haven’t used Codealike Premium before, you can learn about the focus at Focus: What are we talking about. The Focus Curve has very interesting statistical properties, but that is something we will talk about in-depth in another post. For now, it suffices to say that, only a handful of developers are consistently high performers on that metric.

We hope this data will help to start the discussion on how to better improve your everyday performance and show how quantified development can be used to help you be the best developer out there.

OUR CONCLUSIONS & SUGGESTIONS

Turn on Chrome dev-tools (F12) and use it frequently when you browse the same web app you’re developing. There is a consistent use of Chrome dev-tools among highly focused individuals. The frequency of use of dev-tools is as much as twice on both frequency and time than with regular developers. For technical issues or questions, don’t hesitate and go to the web, and quickly. Contrary to conventional wisdom, highly focused developers spend more time browsing technical sites than on Social Networks or Source Control Management tools such as Github or ALMs such as JIRA or TFS. In both frequency and time. No wonder, using Social Networks is bad for your focus. Nearly the same time that the Regular developers spend on Social Networks, Highly Focused developers uses it on tech forums, Q&A platforms and other online developers’ tools. If you can’t avoid the use of Social Networks, try to at least reduce the frequency of your visits. E-mails can be also a harmful distraction. Highly focused developers spend nearly half of the time than the Regular developers checking e-mail. There is also a frequency difference but not as much as we would have expected.

While Highly focused developers spend 7,46% of their time checking e-mail, the Regular developers use 12,61% of their time browsing the web.

Try to concentrate your interaction via e-mail to a given moment of the day. Check, answer and go back to the code ASAP. Embracing Office Collaboration tools may not be a bad idea. This might be counter-intuitive, but actually helping others or getting help via Office Collaboration tools (such as Slack) at your own pace might be better than synchronous interruptions that demand your attention immediately. Highly focused developers browse almost 3X times more Office Collaboration tools than the Regular developers. Use Codealike. No kidding: Highly focused developers uses Codealike nearly twice more than the Regular developers. Data-backed fact 🙂 Highly focused individuals visit Codealike as much as the sum of all web-based Office Tools such as Dropbox, Google Drive or Office. Our hypothesis here is that highly focused individuals are self-aware about their work patterns and our data is providing them the ability to fine-tune.

Percentage of time visited by category for each type of developer