# Tips and Tricks - what are the tricks that people are using to optimize / improve their Glide app development? **URL:** \ **Category:** Ask for Help\ **Created:** [August 13, 2024, 10:50am UTC](https://community.glideapps.com/t/tips-and-tricks-what-are-the-tricks-that-people-are-using-to-optimize-improve-their-glide-app-development/75620 "2024-08-13T10:50:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Mark\_Turrell](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/community.glideapps.com/mark_turrell/32/26605_2.png) [@Mark\_Turrell](https://community.glideapps.com/u/Mark_Turrell)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2024, 10:50am UTC](https://community.glideapps.com/t/tips-and-tricks-what-are-the-tricks-that-people-are-using-to-optimize-improve-their-glide-app-development/75620/1 "2024-08-13T10:50:18Z")
I am always happy to see how people build their apps as I always come away with one idea to improve how I work myself. Sometimes these are things that are well known but sort of need to be discovered (such as naming columns with topic/ thing, topic/ another thing - to have collapsable columns). I just saw how @rayo is using useful emojis and naming convention for his tables, as an example. So, what other things have people come up with these days! Thanks 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Mark\_Turrell](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/community.glideapps.com/mark_turrell/32/26605_2.png) [@Mark\_Turrell](https://community.glideapps.com/u/Mark_Turrell)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2024, 9:49am UTC](https://community.glideapps.com/t/tips-and-tricks-what-are-the-tricks-that-people-are-using-to-optimize-improve-their-glide-app-development/75620/2 "2024-08-27T09:49:51Z")
I will take a note of some of my tricks: 1. when I am working on things like set columns, I often have to pick up values from all kinds of columns. Many of these are things like Question ID 1, QID 2, etc. So I use the type ahead to find the column - and I look for distinct text patterns I can copy. In this case, I would then type ‘id 1’, then ‘id 2’… and this would rapidly find the column (out of the 500+ columns in some tables) 2. column naming - I use the / to separate columns into groupings. I have some that are consistent across tables, such as manage/ to cover all the usc columns I use for admin, and either edit/ or user edit/ for things the user puts in. 3. more column naming - periodically I go through my columns and tidy up, merging some columns together in these grouping, renaming to make the groupings more clear, etc. 4. in data, I often us ‘duplicate column’ rather than add column. This keeps the name of the previous column to the left, and then I edit that. This helps given my above approach for naming - the names can get quite long, and often I have repetitive things (but using q1, q2, etc) 5. I NEVER use the default edit or form functions. Most of my use cases have a need to allow a user to type things… but they might change their mind and so I need a way of rolling back to their previous version. So I have the data columns for the final values, and then a manage/ or edit/ set using user-specific values. My actions then use set columns to move values back and forth. 6. from the above approach, I have learned it best to have consistent naming between my usc and normal values, to make it easier to find! For instance, I just changed one table away from :is content/ publish status and for some reason manage/ live status! 7. consistent column naming for computed columns - I do not like names that hide what is happening behind the scenes 🙂 so my naming would be something like Content/ ite-status. My usual ones are ite (if-then-else), tp- (template), array (things with arrays), rup (rollup), sv (single value), rel- (relationships), etc more to come! hope this helps folk