First of all, I apoligize for the lack of recent posts. Brushing up things for the Qualys Security Conference took all my free time away for the past 3 weeks. I really want to get back on “the one quality post per week” rhythm so expect more things coming your way in the future!

One of my most memorable experiences in software development occured to me about 8 years ago when I started working for Airbus. I was fresh out of college, all pumped up with my master’s degree in network engineering. I had been swimming in code for the past 15 years (though it was mostly self-learning and small hobby projects) and therefore thought firmly with boasting over-confidence that I was an amazing coder. The truth is… I was clueless about how to produce great, maintainable code. The main issue with someone that is overcome with pride is that it always finds itself faultless, rejecting any type of failure onto something or someone else. For me, 8 years ago, it was always Eclipse’s fault.

In an effort to trend towards open-source usage and cost reduction, Airbus had started shifting most of their software development from C++ and VB/C# to the Java world. Most of the code and testing was also slowly shifting from internal development to outsourcing. I entered Airbus in that period of transition, and downloaded Eclipse for the very first time in 2006.

As an advocate of Microsoft products, Visual Studio was to me the pinacle of the IDEs, making the transition to Eclipse incredibly painful. It was slow: autocomplete would take multiple seconds, it would often freeze… The integration with maven was never working. The layout was awkward. Spell-checking ON but line numbers OFF as defaults?! I was repulsed by it. Everything about it made me feel like it was created at the time when dinosaurs were still on the earth. I hated it with my life. In fact, I hated my job for having to use Eclipse. I was a miserable coder who knew deep inside that it was all Eclipse’s fault. I thought that things would get better with the days, but they didn’t. I kept dreaming about creating the site http://www.ihateeclipse.com/ three years before it was even born.

Two weeks had passed, and then came along Ludo, a whiz kid about 5 years older than me down the hall from me. He had heard me curse at the IDE and asked if he could help. I replied with assurance: “Pff there’s nothing anyone can do about it, it’s just Eclipse who’s being a piece of *junk* once again. I’ll fix it.”. He then asked: “What do you mean once again?” after which I started a 10 minutes whining about how awful Eclipse was and how slow it made me as a coder. I was trying to fix a bug and Eclipse was just throwing random errors.

He listened carefully and then asked if he could take a look at the issue at hand. He picked up a chair and I gave him my mouse and keyboard. Ludo then started typing extremely fast, opening up the preferences, changing a bunch of options, tweaking memory usage, server settings, etc. His hands never left the keyboard. All of a sudden everything on my computer, Eclipse included, seemed so fluid, so fast and so responsive. For each specific action, Ludo knew the exact procedure, the right shortcut. The dialogs would open up and close within seconds. Within a few minutes, he had identified the issue, fixed it, tested it and commited the fix. Before leaving, he said: “Eclipse is just another tool. They are only as sharp as you decide them to be.”

I was blown away and became transformed by that experience. Back with my keyboard and mouse, Eclipse seemed slow again, but now I knew that if I learned how to use the tool well, it could be extremely powerful and fast. And not just Eclipse, but every other tool as well! My OS, my text editor, my browser… Everytime I went back to Ludo’s desk, he was only working through emacs and a linux terminal, something I had never thought possible before. But he had mastered those 2 tools to perfection and was faster at producing efficient code using them than with any other tool.

With the years, I have come to master a small number of tools. For example I know all the shortcuts in Photoshop, I am fluent in Visual Studio, I never use the mouse in Eclipse, I use my own Sublime Text plugins and hand-made extensions in Chrome’s dev console. Just like learning to play an instrument, mastering any tool is hard and requires dedication and a lot of time. I have tweaked Eclipse and Visual Studio in so many ways that not a lot of people can use my instances without feeling that they are a bit awkward. I have modified/treasured the tools in a way that they have become a part of me as a coder. I improved my typing so that I could be fully efficient in both french and english using any type of keyboard layout. And with the years, I have come to the conclusion that one of the best ways to become a better coder is to learn to master the tools that you use. And this is not a learn-everything-in-24-hours type of thing.

Even today we still see a lot of open debates about Eclipse vs Netbeans vs IntelliJ, about .net vs java, about rails vs django vs laravel, the eternal conflict of PC vs Mac, etc. And seeing a title like “the best [insert any word here] in the world” is enough to bring people to frenetic behaviour. To those who seek which tool is better, I want to quote again from the amazing and inspirational coder I met at Airbus 8 years ago: “Tools are only as sharp as you decide them to be”. Now pick an IDE, a browser, an editor that you feel good with, and go master it. Make it your own. Make it the best tool in the world.