It was Abraham Lincoln who said "Give me 6 hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first 4hrs sharpening the axe." Sometimes, no matter how stressful and difficult our job seems, all we need is to take our time and improve on our tools or techniques.
When I saw this Hive Learner's prompt about a work tool I use all the time, the first tool that came to my mind was Visual Code Studio Software Development Tool. Maybe because it is one of the best environment to create software applications and digital products.
Nowadays, whenever I open my laptop the first place I visit is my Visual Studio Coding IDE (Environment). From the screenshot of my Home page, you would see how I duplicated and separated my VS code tool because it is ususally impossible that I do not use it whenever my laptop is on.
VS code has been around for over a decade now and you might be surprise to know that some of your favorite applications and websites passed through VS code during their creation. I can't speak for every developer, but I believe almost every developer use VS code for their daily work because why not.
I was not always a fan of VS Code because when I started learning how to code back then in school, I still remember how we practiced HTML and CSS with Notepad, but to me it was more slower and frustrating.
This takes us back to that Abraham Lincoln's quote, as sometimes our work becomes a little bit frustrating and slower simply because our tools are either outdated or needs upgrade. My brain tricked me to stay with what I was familiar with, but I am glad I took out time to sharpen my axe (explored the VS Code tool).
Imagine you are writing a novel and you could either use a basic notepad or you could use a magical notebook that can catch your spelling mistakes before you finish the word, suggests better ways to phrase your sentences as you type, keeps track of every change you have ever made, lets you test how your book looks in print with one button, connects to research libraries instantly, and so on. I believe everyone would go for the tool that makes their work faster and better.
Ladies and gentlemen, that's VS Code for writing software. Basically, it's a text editor, but calling it that is like calling a smartphone "a device that just makes calls", technically true but massively undersold.
VS Code is a free software environment built by Microsoft that runs on any computer, both for Windows, Mac, even Linux. It understands virtually every programming language on Earth, and it transforms the chaotic process of writing code into something almost perfect.
For me, the best part about VS Code is the debugging part, where am looking for how to catch errors in my work and fix them. This tool has many features to help me with this especially using ESLint to catch errors thay would have broken my codebase tomorrow.
Depending on what we do, I believe everyone has their favorite working tools. It could be digital or something physical and VS Code is one of my favorite digital tool.
All Images Used Are Mine.