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Web developer tool secrets that shouldn’t be secrets

christianheilmann.com

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Re: Web developer tool secrets that shouldn’t be secrets

#7
So this is basically a technical PR blog post promoting Windows Edge?

Never used it, but it looks pretty much like chrome dev tools, which might be, because they just copied it, when they forked chrome/webkit?

Well, why not copy what works, but is there anything edge dev tools are now doing better than chrome?

(there seems to be a connection possible to VS code, is that useful?)

Re: Web developer tool secrets that shouldn’t be secrets

#9
> Many things heralded as the best thing since sliced bread in presentations and video tutorials are hardly every opened, let alone used.

This reminds me of something I heard once... that the first half of Portal (the video game) is basically a giant playable tutorial, and that a lot of video games start off with a tutorial disguised as gameplay, and that this is actually pretty pleasant.

The world's gotten pretty good at crafting tutorials disguised as gameplay. Could we do this with dev tools? Has anyone tried to make "VSCode: the game"?

Maybe "tip of the day" popups could be restructured as minigames?

Possible hurdles I can think of off the top of my head:

- a fancy tutorial probably runs into exactly what the author mentions on the next few lines: that adding more documentation doesn't fix things, because most people don't go to the documentation.

- In a game it's very easy to tune the tutorial to what you'll later encounter. A dev tool tutorial... every dev's needs are different. I imagine you'd have to structure it as a tutorial for "core functionality", plus separate tutorials for each extension.

- In the game context, I'm expecting to do certain actions repetitively. This has the side-effect of refining those skills. In a dev context, repetition is often considered a smell (though, I'd argue even in dev work we pick up a lot of little katas without thinking about it).

- Harping on repetition some more... what about the debugging tools that I only need to use once in a blue moon?

Re: Web developer tool secrets that shouldn’t be secrets

#10

Open secrets aka secrets for people who can’t RTFM. Good tips! I would argue that the IDE is the connector of the editing + debugging experience. Otherwise there’s a reason they’re disconnected.

You might be surprised how limited some otherwise very competent people's understanding of dev tools is. Console being such a primary example probably isn't an accident; tons of people don't know what it's capable of.

I suspect people don't RTFM because frankly there are so many Ms to R. It's overwhelming at times.

Many carpenters can get by without learning little tricks here and there while still being excellent carpenters overall. I think it's the same in software. We tend to focus on doing what we know best, and sometimes that means we skip the odd manual here and there.

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