One of the things that is becoming more apparent to me all the time is how important it is to know the tools that are out there and how to use them. Just about everything that I have to do someone else has had to do before and has built a tool to help them out with it.
Right now I am learning how to use JMeter. Everything that I want to do with it (so far) has been done before, I just have to figure out how to use it. One thing about it though, it's definitely a developer made for developers (god, I hate swing).
The same is true for the other tools that I use. The trick is figuring out how to use them. That's the first trick. The second one is knowing what other tools are out there. The third trick is knowing when to use what tool. Now I'm not saying that I know all the answers, but I am definitely trying to figure it out as fast as possible.
I agree. Tools can make you orders of magnitude more productive -- you just have to realise how to exploit them.
ReplyDeleteUnit testing and code coverage tools don't immediately seem like they would make a programmer more productive, until this point is considered: when is the code done?
Most developers probably think that code is done when they first write it, but they probably don't count their own rewrites, bugfixes and the necessary manual testing. Tools like unit testing and code coverage make rewrites safer, bugfixes less common, and manual testing less necessary when used properly, which actually brings the programmer closer to "done" faster.
True, the progress is slower in the short term ... but slow and steady often wins the race in the end.
Yeah, I always hated swing too. Along with AWT. I found developing with them to be quite annoying. That is until I started using NetBeans and could just draw them out like in VB. I don't think UI design was meant to be done in code, as figuring out where things go by specifying coordinates just doesn't work in most people's heads. Anyway, i'm not sure if this is the aspect of Swing that you actually hate, but it's the part that I hate.
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