Keeping it Sharpened (part 1)
Given the previous post on how the niceties of Visual Studio may unconsciously causing our skills to atrophy. In line with that I wanted to post a few action items we can take to help ensure our skills continuously receive sharpening. This is part one of more to come.
One thing we can start to do is pick a completely different editor to work in once in a while. Maybe a favorite one that was pre-Visual Studio (I hope you have one). There are many to choose from but here are a few:
This serves as a great little exercise which once can follow as they see fit. It forces us to think a bit more for various reasons.
- Code complete is not available available. This forces our brain to think more, which in turn can have good results if kept up.
- More time is spent researching outside of the IDE. SDK docs, books, magazines, blogs, etc. are read with more vigor which can produce a positive overall learning experience.
- For whatever reason it seems to get us back to the roots of the language. Remember what it was like when we had to write our first piece of code without referencing something else? Blind so to say? Once the crutch went away we probably felt a little lost, but as time went on we actually LEARNED.
- The IDE has the potential of making us feel so comfortable and therefore causing us to never step outside of it. We should never get so comfortable that it becomes scary or we lose our balance when put into an environment that is not similar. I mean, how many of us cannot operate when we head over to a teammates computer and they have everything configured different!
This tip of working outside of the IDE cannot always be done. Obviously, when working on anything strictly UI related, this becomes more of a challenge and we’re probably better off remaining in the design tool. Also, until there is some way to build code on the command line, it becomes somewhat tedious to have to switch between IDE and external editor for every compile. So, this is a prerequisite and needs to be done. Can you build on the command line (this is itself another post all together)?
Remember that anything we can do to spawn more thinking is actually good! It forces us to use the brain pieces. The best of the best are those that when placed in unfamiliar conditions/environments adjust and do so in a rapid manner. So the question becomes, if somebody took away our precious environment could we adapt, or would it hurt so bad that it pretty much rendered us useless?
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