/know-ur-ide

Supporting documents for a "Know your IDE" workshop. Work In Progress!

Know Your Tools - IDE

This project contains supporting documents for a "Know your Tools" workshop, focused on the IDE.

The idea of the workshop came from the principle that good crafters know their tools well. I noticed I wasn't making good use of the various features and shortcuts of my IDE and thought investing the time to learn them would be beneficial.

Exercises

The various exercises are here to help you discover features of your existing IDE, or might be useful if you want to switch to a new one to start exploring. There are some exercises covering basic text editing, some based around refactoring, etc . You are encouraged to follow a "both hands on keyboard" rule to go further and forgo the mouse/trackpad entirely to start building muscle memory for those time saving shortcuts....

Each exercise is described in the corresponding .md file. They follow a loose logical order, but there is no dependency between them, so you can pick & choose. The general format is:

  • Do XYZ - no constraints
  • Find a quicker way (explore menus / identify shortcuts / ask around...)
  • Practice new way several times

The suggested refactoring is based on the code from "legacy code retreat", which you can find here: https://github.com/jbrains/trivia . It covers a variety of languages. I recommend picking one which you're already familiar with. However, if there's another codebase you're familiar with, there are probably relevant examples too!

Prep

Ingredients needed on your machine before you start going into the exercises:

  • IDE / Text Editor of choice
  • "legacy code retreat" project for your chosen language
  • a local version control system will help, like git (we'll be doing some change, reset, repeat cycles)

What next

Keep practicing the shortcuts - long-term learning comes from repetition. Optimum rate is now, then next day, next week, next month and then that should be it in your brains for life...

References