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!"?
Top comments (4)
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.
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
Lately Kubernetes gave me this same feeling.
Such a great episode! I remember the first time I used ANT and had the same feeling :)