One of the things that I came across multiple times in my career, is the need for good tools, but at the same time, I think the selection and deep learning of those tools are underestimated.
We all know that tools are just something that helps us to make the job done, but it's not just about that, tools should make your life easier, and improve your overall experience while improving your productivity.
But for some reason, most of the time we don't take the appropriate time to research which tool is better for what task, or which one could be better for our personal liking.
One example could be the one that I'm using just to write this post. As a Spanish native speaker, I sometimes struggle to write in proper English, so I need to use a tool that helps me correct some grammatical and orthographical issues. That's why I'm using Grammarly to help me with that.
But as Developers, we rely on dozens of tools in our daily work, and most of them have many different options that could help us make that work easier and leave us some time for the most important tasks.
Let's put another example, if you are a web developer, you spend most of your time working on the browser, and probably you already know the Chrome Development Tools where you can see the HTML, CSS, and more. However, most people I have seen using this tool don't know that it can do a lot more than that.
You can use Chrome Development Tools to watch every request that is made to the server, you can see all the files loaded from that page, you can measure the performance of a Website recording, and even take automatic screenshots while you do to know what was on the page when it was slow
Also, you have a Command Menu inside the tools to have better access to the different sections and options.
You can even modify the CSS of certain sites in a persistent way (it will persist even if you Refresh the page). This also could be useful to make some modifications to one page to customize it for you all the time and keep that changes.
Another thing that I have seen working with other Devs is that most of them don't put any effort into configuring and using a good Debugger. I mean, it's always convenient to use console.log, print, or whatever to just know what is happening at a certain point of your application, I still do it myself more than I would like to admit, but when you have a good debugger configured with your IDE is just wonderful.
Using breakpoints, configuring Watchers for specific variables, changing the value of variables in runtime, and more, all of that is just a great value that will help you to debug some issues or create new features.
I could keep going since all of this applies to every aspect of your life and your work, but you get the point. The idea of all of this is just to remark on the importance of knowing your tools. Take a little moment to think about what are the tasks that take you a lot of time in your day, and ask yourself:
- How I could improve that?
- The way that I'm doing it is the more efficient one.
- There are tools that do the same?
- Which tools I'm already using it?
- Do I really have investigated some of the options that they provide?
As a Software Developer, this is one of the most valuable pieces of advice that I could share with someone since we usually are just too busy making stuff to have a moment to try to learn something different about a new Programming Language, a new Framework, or a new Library.
To put it simply, tools are like a superhero's sidekick. They make our lives easier and help us get the job done faster. But just like a superhero needs to know their sidekick's strengths and weaknesses, we need to know our tools inside and out. Take a hammer, for example. Some of them have two sides, with a hammerhead at one end and a claw at the other. If we never take the time to understand the purpose of the claw, we're missing out on a lot of the tool's potential!
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