How Investing Time in Workflow Improvements Builds Confidence and Efficiency for New Software Developers

Developers new to the software engineering world spend the majority of their time trying to understand core programming concepts and creating practice projects in their target software language, and rightly so; the main focus for programming students at this time should be these things. The stress of learning as much as possible as quickly as possible likely effects self-taught and bootcamp students more acutely –those students who hope that earning proficiency in this industry will open new career doors for them, yet they may not have four years to devote to that transition.

For this demographic of students who are stuck in a state of feeling completely overwhelmed by the fast-paced world of software development and the sheer volume of material to learn and practice, there is cheat code for building confidence. It may seem obvious to some, but for those whom it is not obvious for: spend 5% of your time learning more about the tools you are using to learn to code, rather than just the coding itself.

Many new software developers use Visual Studio Code, which offers virtually endless extensions and countless keyboard shortcuts that make daily life as a developer faster and more convenient. Some of them may not be useful to you, and some of them may be incredibly useful. Taking the time to learn which ones have value to you and actually implementing them into your workflow will make you feel much more confident and efficient.

Snippets

Visual Studio Code has an option to configure snippets of code that you can then access by using their prefixes. Create a snippet by navigating to Preferences > Configure User Snippets. Snippets are incredibly helpful for bits of syntax you often stumble over, methods you use often, and boilerplate code that isn’t necessarily important for you to know by heart.

Keyboard Shortcuts

If spending time learning keyboard shortcuts feels like it’s slowing you down, that’s because it is… for now. This can be especially disheartening when you already feel like simply writing a function or remembering syntax takes you forever. But investing time in learning how to edit multiple lines at once, or easily select and change the name of every instance of a single variable in your file will save you time, make your coding experience more enjoyable, reduce interruptions in your thought flow, and build confidence.

Extensions

The Todo Tree extension allows you to mark parts of your code as “todos” which you can then easily access in the Todo Tree tab in VS Code. It doesn’t stop there, though – you can configure as many types of todos as you want in your settings.json file. Refactor opportunities, questions, and bugs are some other examples of things you might want to configure in your settings. Each type can be customized visually with different colors and icons so they are easy to spot as you scroll through your code.