Make Your Own Tools

Wealthfront blogger Spencer Miskoviak pointed out that creating custom DevTools specific to applications can achieve higher levels of abstraction, handling user interactions or debugging tracking events, etc. While this requires building and maintaining custom DevTools, it also means that it can be customized to the needs of the application and engineers, thus simplifying the development process.

Build a team-specific custom tool that is very cool and efficient. Even custom tools for your own use can significantly increase productivity. Building custom tools for the entire team and accepting the ideas of team members can further enhance value.

Miskoviak shows off a variety of tools they developed that are integrated into a UI pop-up widget:

• Show current branch and CI status
• Fill in the form, perform user actions, and switch between users
• Highlight components

Very clever design.

CodePen, while there are no advanced UI widgets like this, also incorporates some productivity-enhancing features into the application. For example, many forms have pre-filled buttons that are only displayed for developers:

In addition, we have a custom tool for supporting inboxes that provides context information for users and content that support ticket references:

Not to mention that the website itself also has a complete protected management area for performing a range of tasks for administrators and developers:

I think the "component highlighting" feature mentioned by Miskoviak is particularly good:

React DevTools can help view which parts of the current page are which components, but this is not displayed on the page like this tool. I think it would be great to add a small link next to each title? to open the corresponding file in VS Code.

Speaking of building your own tools, Shawn Wang recently wrote the article “You can create your own tools”:

Even the best software has some parts that aren't very good for you. But the difference between you and others is that you can program.

Wang talks about things like...

• Build your own custom stylesheet
• Build a UI query generator
• Build your own CLI (this reminds me of Mina Markham's dot file)
• Build your own agent

Wang even built a proxy for Google search results for himself to optimize the results and present them to your preferences:

Sometimes I focus on the development of the tool, which leads me to do things like when I decide to "run Gulp when opening a VS Code project using VS Code tasks", I have to learn all the relevant knowledge and overcome all kinds of weird problems. I think the great DevOps people in the company are very concerned about these things - constantly thinking about the developer experience of their own team.

I even wrote a script not too long ago to open a text-based multiplayer video game I played to save time.

Speaking of building your own tools, I think of Dick Proenneke's experience in the documentary "Live Alone in the Wild". In the opening clip of the film, you can hear Dick talk about how he made tools by hand, which is very useful for him because he doesn't need to move tools deep into the remote wilderness of Alaska.

?

The above is the detailed content of Make Your Own Tools. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!