DEV Community: Lelin Padhan

My Journey from Clueless to ‘Hey, It’s on the VS Code Marketplace!’

Lelin Padhan — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 18:38:54 +0000

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had this unstoppable curiosity. It’s the kind of curiosity that leads you into all sorts of rabbit holes, from learning obscure trivia to tinkering with code. I’m a developer, and like most developers, I rely on a ton of VS Code extensions to make my life easier. Then one day, a thought hit me: What if I published something on the VS Code Marketplace? Imagine that—me, the creator of a VS Code extension! I’d officially be the founder of… well, something.

🎨 The Grand Plan: A VS Code Theme

Since diving head-first into extension development sounded a bit intimidating, I decided to start with something I’d actually enjoy and understood on some level: a theme. I didn’t have any clue what I was doing, so I turned to my two trusty teachers—Google and YouTube. I stumbled across a few videos that mentioned this cool tool called Theme Studio for VS Code. It lets you design a VS Code theme and exports a JSON file of your creation. I had my theme file in hand, and I was ready to go. Or so I thought.

🛠 Enter the Rabbit Hole of Publishing

After a little more research, I learned that publishing a theme on the VS Code Marketplace isn’t just a matter of hitting “upload.” Turns out, there’s something called Yo Code Generator that sets up your project template, and then VSCE (Visual Studio Code Extension Manager) to handle the publishing part. Easy enough, right? Well, Microsoft decided to make things interesting.

To publish anything on the Marketplace, you need a Microsoft DevOps account and a Personal Access Token (PAT) to authenticate. So I followed the tutorial video step-by-step, only to be met with a parade of errors. Every fix just led to another error, but I wasn’t about to let a few (okay, many) errors stop me. I was going to publish this theme, even if it took all day.

🚀 The Publish Button… Finally

After tons of troubleshooting, following the latest docs, and a few moments of existential dread, I finally hit publish using VSCE. My theme was live on the Marketplace! It was an incredible moment. But as any developer knows, once you get one thing working, three other things break.

📈 Versioning: The Next Frontier

As I worked on improvements for the theme, I realized I needed a way to handle versioning—otherwise, updating the theme would quickly become a nightmare. That’s when I remembered I had GitHub Copilot, thanks to my university email. Copilot is like a clueless assistant who sometimes accidentally stumbles upon helpful suggestions. Together, we got the idea to try GitHub Actions to automate updates.

This was uncharted territory for me, so I dove into the docs and built my first CI pipeline with GitHub Actions. I used Semantic Release to handle the versioning, generate changelogs, and add release tags. Of course, there were more errors (mostly thanks to my GitHub PAT not having the right permissions), but I powered through. Finally, the whole setup worked.

🎉 The Finishing Touches

To top it all off, I added an AI-generated logo, improved my documentation, and did my best to make the project look polished. Although I’m still manually bumping the version for npm (since I haven’t fully figured that part out), my theme is up and running smoothly.

If you check out my GitHub, you’ll see a string of messy commits—a testament to the learning process. This project taught me more than any course could, covering everything from basic theme creation to advanced CI/CD setup. Now that I’ve built a solid foundation, I’m ready to dive into even more ambitious projects.

💡 Final Thoughts: Curiosity Is Everything

If there’s one takeaway from this journey, it’s that curiosity can take you far. When you’re curious, nothing can stop you—not errors, not confusing docs, not even Microsoft’s complex publishing requirements. So, if you’ve got a spark of curiosity, follow it. You never know where it might lead!

P.S. Check out my VS Code Marketplace, and don’t forget to give it a star on Github ⭐. I’ll be actively working on any issues that pop up to polish it even further. If you want, I can blog an entire in-depth tutorial for you guys, diving into each step!

Happy coding! 🎉