- An extremely productive, like, 100x senior engineer I know works on a stock Ubuntu box with the default desktop wallpaper and an un-customized IntelliJ IDE and when he opens an IDE window he doesn't even full screen or center it. Just blasting code in an un-centered 68% width IDE.
- The smartest person I know (like, easily) uses the tcsh shell, the nvi editor, and the twm or ratpoision window manager, all ancient, unmaintained tools. I think they were the state of the art when he started using Unix and he never bothered switching.
- I saw a very clever bitcoin developer just set `contenteditable="true"` on an HTML element and use it as a text editor, I think because he already had the window open.
- Another developer I know with insane quality standards just names things "foo" when he can't think of a name for things, to the point where we worked on a project together for a month in a repo called "foo" until we came up with a name.
What are some good examples you've witnessed?