We are blessed to be working at a time when we have so many great tools, add-ons, and services to help us get our work done.
But with that convenience comes some ignorance.
I know that sounds harsh. Read on.
It is too easy to use a tool or let something take care of fixing issues, templated code, or command line Kung foo to make building something faster without knowing what it is doing or how it works.
Take time to learn what just happened and why. There are a couple of reasons to do this.
You never know when a tool might stop working. Maybe it broke in a software upgrade, became obsolete, not maintained, and will no longer work in the future.
Never trust the code you did not write. Yes, this is tough, but you never know what might be waiting to bite you.
A classic example that I have come across so many times is people that use a tool for Git and never learn how to do even just basic commands from a terminal.
Why should you bother?
Because you might have to SSH to a machine that does not have the same tools you are used to. Likely, a server will only have the tools it needs to perform tasks. That would be good practice, by the way.
So you need to know how to perform Git tasks from the terminal and do so confidently without screwing something up, especially in a production environment. If you were on one of my teams, I’d expect you to be able to do this.
So next time you sit down and use the tools of choice, take a few minutes to understand what they are doing. Then, next time, try and do it without the convenient tool and see if you learned what you need to take those skills to the next level and maybe impress teammates along the way.
Need another reason?
Sure, think about this one, this will happen one day if you ever interview for a position.
They will likely not let you use the tool or have it available during technical interviews, so they know that you at least understand how things work.
I bet that one just got your attention!
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