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I don't know, but I one practice along my journey has had a surprising impact upon my skill development. That one thing is: I started coding in VIM. For some re

by davmar 6y ago

I don't know, but I one practice along my journey has had a surprising impact upon my skill development. That one thing is: I started coding in VIM. For some reason, making that change has improved my thinking, and that's been a big part of my growth. So, maybe you'll find that to be a helpful practice as well. It's worth a try.

bhattisatish 6y ago
I don't want to sound over critical. It's not about the vim. Can you generalize it a bit more? Let me take a shot at it(!?) You introduced a new tool to your workflow. The consequences of that was - Lower productivity initially - You where forced to think about how you create/edit your code So, what made it work for you? - Thinking about how you structure and edit your code. This gave you some clarity around how to think and solve a given problem. Longer you practiced this, better you became at it. - Learning a new tool made you a better at certain things (Say how you manipulate large amount of text?). Better you became, more confidence you derived out of it. More confidence resulted in taking up more harder problems, and the cycle continues. - You have started thinking about your tools. You spent time and energy in learning it. This has broadened how you think about software development. This in turn has widened your ability to look at the software problems. I am not sure what I wrote resonates with you or not. But this is what I took away from you response "Making that change has improved my thinking" I feel, it's not the choice of the specific tool that made a difference, but the result of changing your regular habits that VIM bought about in your way of writing code. I am sure, a person who changed to emacs or Jetbrains also would have seen something change :-)
- davmar 6y ago
  Great question and it's not overly critical. I'm afraid I can't give you a satisfying answer even though I would like to because even I'm not sure why VIM acted as a catalyst for me. What I think it did for me is two things: - the splits allows me to have multiple files (aka buffers) open at ones time and this might decrease the number of times I have costly context switches. - the vi way of manipulating text is faster and more efficient in terms of steps needed to complete an edit. I believe this reduces the cognitive load of mundane tasks and lets my mind stay focused on the actual problem I'm solving. VI may not help everyone obviously. But I think it opened a flood gate for me. Also the initial lower productivity wasn't really that bad so I don't think it had too much of an impact.

by davmar 6y ago

bhattisatish 6y ago

I don't want to sound over critical. It's not about the vim. Can you generalize it a bit more? Let me take a shot at it(!?) You introduced a new tool to your workflow. The consequences of that was - Lower productivity initially - You where forced to think about how you create/edit your code So, what made it work for you? - Thinking about how you structure and edit your code. This gave you some clarity around how to think and solve a given problem. Longer you practiced this, better you became at it. - Learning a new tool made you a better at certain things (Say how you manipulate large amount of text?). Better you became, more confidence you derived out of it. More confidence resulted in taking up more harder problems, and the cycle continues. - You have started thinking about your tools. You spent time and energy in learning it. This has broadened how you think about software development. This in turn has widened your ability to look at the software problems. I am not sure what I wrote resonates with you or not. But this is what I took away from you response "Making that change has improved my thinking" I feel, it's not the choice of the specific tool that made a difference, but the result of changing your regular habits that VIM bought about in your way of writing code. I am sure, a person who changed to emacs or Jetbrains also would have seen something change :-)

davmar 6y ago
Great question and it's not overly critical. I'm afraid I can't give you a satisfying answer even though I would like to because even I'm not sure why VIM acted as a catalyst for me. What I think it did for me is two things: - the splits allows me to have multiple files (aka buffers) open at ones time and this might decrease the number of times I have costly context switches. - the vi way of manipulating text is faster and more efficient in terms of steps needed to complete an edit. I believe this reduces the cognitive load of mundane tasks and lets my mind stay focused on the actual problem I'm solving. VI may not help everyone obviously. But I think it opened a flood gate for me. Also the initial lower productivity wasn't really that bad so I don't think it had too much of an impact.