Aesthetics and personalization towards mastery

Published on 2017-08-07T20:27:24-04:00 by Mohd

My wonderfully personalized IDE

I am a huge fan of personalization. Anywhere and everywhere. Personalization is the present and it is the future.

• Google personalizes ads to increase the likelihood of conversion.
• Netflix held competitions to try and improve their recommendation engine.
• Amazon personalizes results and offers product suggestions personalized to the user.
• This machine churns out 400 personalized burgers an hour.
• Spotify's discover weekly personalizes music discovery allowing the subscribers to discover new music they would enjoy.

But I don't want to talk about that.

I think personalization is important for programmers and power users. I have noticed a trend in that the most proficient, talented, developers and system admins also tend to be very opinionated and adept at their tools of choice. If you think about it, it makes total sense. Mastery of the tools is the first step towards mastery of any domain. I think computer programming is no different! I also think that a great indicator of mastery is personalization, although that is most certainly not universally true.

• Keyboard shortcuts are objectively faster than clicking everything. Learning shortcuts for the most common tasks is a good step towards mastery.
• Being comfortable with the command line interface is also pretty important. Often times you can get around it, but it pays to work on having this skill.
• Being great at git on the CLI. Source control management is central in software development, and so is Git these days. Git has such an incredibly high ROI. Being fast and comfortable with git pays dividends.
• Personalize your text editor/IDE. You spend a lot of time inside it, it should be sexy enough such that you want to use it. Your editor and IDE should make you feel like you have superpowers! If you feel good working and writing code, chances are you'll enjoy it more and do a better job.
• Make your own tools! Extend existing tools. Tools are awesome.

If you know of a tool that you'd like for me and others to try out, write to me:
mohd.ali.el@gmail.com