The past few days I've been struck with this lucky feeling.
As I scroll through my Twitter feed, I realise I'm following some amazing people who are brilliant at tech. And thanks to Twitter, I have access to all these great minds in one place! As they share their insights and links to articles, I get to read it all and learn from it.
Over on Slack, some local developers had the great idea to set up a group for local tech people to join. The early days in a startup can be difficult because the team is small, sometimes you need someone else in a similar position to yourself to bounce ideas off. Today I wanted someone to look at my plan for how I'm intending to structure our live Azure environment to make sure I wasn't doing anything crazy. A quick plea in the local tech Slack channel and less than an hour later, a complete stranger had offered their help and then spent almost an hour talking to me.
In all of these cases, the people are the most important part because without them the tools wouldn't be of as much use. However having access to these tools makes these connections infinitely easier.
Developers often joke that they couldn't do their job without Google, but I think that list is definitely starting to grow.
What tools do you use on a daily basis that you wouldn't want to be without? Do they make your job easier or more enjoyable? Do they make you better at what you do? Are there any particular people you follow that you find inspirational?
Top comments (6)
In the very beginning, being self-taught, one of the places Google brought me to often was w3schools. They have beginner tutorials on all sorts of front-end and even some back-end topics in a really easy to understand way. Once you
git goodyou can upgrade over to the Mozilla Developer Network, which goes over many more topics and in much more detail.We are lucky to be in an industry where the topics are actually exciting (to us at least). Someone in the Azure community was probably willing to help you because they found the topic genuinely interesting. Some industries are based completely on things nobody would do for free. While there are a lot of things in this space we wouldn't do for free, there is plenty we would.
So I am extremely grateful for that, and I think it's why people are (not always, but often) so damn helpful.
I agree wholeheartedly! I love what I do and the tech that I use so I'll happily give my time to help someone else along this path when I get the opportunity.
I'm thankful for StackOverflow 😆. I love seeing that sometimes I'm not the only one struggling with a weird issue. I'm very grateful to see a guy who struggled with the same issue 5 years ago asked a question on SO that received a thorough answer. While the policy they have in place can be intimidating for new programmers, I praise SO for the community they have created.
Good choice! SO is an amazing resource
To start off the discussion, as mentioned above I find Twitter and Slack to be very important tools. I would also add Pocket to the list though. I see so many great links posted on Twitter, I don't have time to read them all straightaway so I add them to my Pocket so I can go back over them when I have more time.