I was listening to a recent episode of Syntax the other day in which they were discussing tools that used to be all the rage, but don't get a lot of love any more.
The conversation started on Gulp and Grunt, and I found myself getting pretty nostalgic. Walking home from the office in the dark under the street lights, I almost found myself getting downright emotional.
I didn't really know anybody in the industry when I got serious about web development, so I stayed up to date mostly with tutorial sites and blogs. I just sort of picked up good tools and practices as I stumbled across them. Eventually, I read an article about Grunt, the hip new way to automate your build process. For me, it was like going from 0-100 in a split second.
So anyway, hearing about Grunt made me think of the early days of my career and the first time I picked something up that felt like it multiplied my powers tenfold.
I was wondering if anyone here had any similar moments in their development path? When was the first time you found yourself going "NOW we're cookin' with gas!"?
Latest comments (4)
A Linux CLI such as bash and zsh. I started to learn basic commands then wandered to more complicated one while also playing with different plugins. That's when I discovered that while GUIs have their place, the CLI is way, way more powerful in what you can do. The time when I started to be more comfortable using the command line is when I saw my productivity and understanding of some IT fundamentals skyrocketed. That knowledge made me at ease very fast in environnement that had similar environment as bash or zsh. Today I won't know how I could work without a CLI
It all started when I felt like I wanted to make a Discord bot. All I have been doing thus far was creating static web pages. Yes, I manually wrote my HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from scratch. Trust me, it isn't as bad as it sounds. It's therapeutic, actually.
Then I did what any normal programmer would do upon gaining interest on something: I scoured the internet far and wide for tutorials. Then I went to YouTube for tutorials. That's when I discovered Node.js. That's when I really started cookin' with gas. It was a fun ride. I have learned so much since then. I'd say I learned so much more in months than what I have learned in my first years of writing good ol' browser JavaScript.
Lately Kubernetes gave me this same feeling.
Such a great episode! I remember the first time I used ANT and had the same feeling :)