16: Do you have all the right tools in your toolbox?

Runtime Arguments

Wolf has lots of great information about the tools you should consider using when developing software projects. Jim chimes in with his own ideas.

Takeaways

Just a few take-aways this episode and I hope by this point you have already internalized them and this is just a summary.

• I’ve presented categories: the tools you will absolutely need to get your job done. You will need an editor. You will need language. You will need a source-code control strategy. The first take-away from this episode is these categories! Do you have everything you need? Are you using it when you actually need it? Have you been using print when what you really needed was a debugger?
• I’m going to separate this next take-away into angles. These angles have the same implication: to get the right tools, you might need to do a little research.
  • Do you know what all a tool in a given category can do for you?
    If you’re a Notepad user and didn’t know that PyCharm or Helix or VS Code could rename a method and fix it across your entire project in a single command (skipping over things that were spelled the same but weren’t actual uses of that method) … then why would switching even cross your mind?
  • Do the “math”: is an alternative enough better to make you switch?
    Will you get out of it more than you put into the switch? Git was enough better, for Jim, than Subversion. But in editors, Helix is not enough better for Jim, to make him leave Vim. There’s nothing wrong with that! In every case, it’s never about which is better; it’s about which is enough better. Is the juice worth the squeeze?
• Maybe one tool is not enough! I personally do the bulk of my editing in Helix; but sometimes, PyCharm does the specific thing I need. Both are at my fingertips. You don’t have to settle for just one tool.
• And finally, as always for me, the underlying theme is: are you spending whatever it is you’re spending (time, money, effort) on the things with the biggest payback? Using a great editor, an editor that you are great at using, lets you work faster and more effectively. The right tool doing the right job at the right time helps you spend less on your way to the end goal.

Links

Here's a link to the github repo with the project for reading Meater temperature probes: https://github.com/Runtime-Arguments/meater

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Jim McQuillan can be reached at [email protected]
Wolf can be reached at [email protected]
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Theme music:
Dawn by nuer self, from the album Digital Sky