Productivity is in the tools you use

As I get back into the groove of weekend projects, I find myself optimizing my workflow. We often associate productivity with our abilities to stay focused. But as software developers and engineers, our tools are as equally important - or more importantly, the extensions and plugins we utilize in our code editors.

Dev tools can make or break our focus, and enhance or destroy our outputs and dead time.

What is dead time?

It's that time in between clicking, moving our mouse, searching, and the little things that eventually add up to hours of necessary actions that get us from point A to point B.

Here's a quick list for Visual Studio Code:

• Auto Rename Tag makes life easier by renaming the paired tag when you start making edits to it.
• Prettier Code Formatter is opinionated, used by over 22 million VS Code installations, and a staple plugin extension for every developer.
• CSS Peek cuts down the hunting time involved in tracking down specific classes and ids.
• Better Comments make code comments less like a giant block of text and more human-friendly.
• Peacock lets you quickly identify projects opened based on color.

Another note on VS Code:

Bracket Pair Colorizer is now native on VS Code. It is a feature (formerly VS Code extension) that color matches your {} curly braces.

How to turn it on 👇

1. In VSCode, go under the File Menu -> Preferences -> Settings
2. Search for the setting: bracketPair
3. Click the checkbox to turn on the bracket pair colorization

Just Chrome things

I'm sure I'm not the only one with a gazillion tabs open. There's nothing wrong with that but Chrome is notorious for eating up your RAM. With less RAM available, the slower things run and at some point, Chrome is going to crash, and sorting that out takes up.  Tab Suspender automatically suspends, parks, and hibernates inactive tabs to save up to 80% of memory.

What I stumbled into this week...

While on LinkedIn, I stumbled into an interesting management tool called Atarim. It's made for designers and developers who are in dire need of a streamlined approach to managing clients, team members, and organization-wide requests for updates, upgrades, changes, and everything else in between.  

With Atarim, there are no more screenshots sent through emails, tracking down Trello and Jira tickets, and working out who's doing what and when things are due.

Quote of the week

In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different – Coco Chanel.