Introduction

[00:00:00]
>> Steve.: I have a close friend named Juan. And before he was a software engineer, he was a chef. And he had this point that he made to me nine years ago, kind of relating that, a good chef or cook knows their tools incredibly well, the concept of like mise en place.

[00:00:20]
A place of getting everything organized and ready to go before you sit down to do your work. There's a lot of other fields where running around and being kind of doing things very tediously or manually, is not gonna work, right? As a software engineer, because we are mostly sitting in front of the computer, and it's minor movements with our hand and stuff along those lines.

[00:00:44]
It doesn't always feel maybe not having the best handle on all our tools was really slowing us down. Because, to be clear, I joke that a large part of software engineer, not necessarily the writing of the code, but the thinking of the problem. That said, I do think that there is something to be said for getting really, really, really comfortable with your tools to kind of clear that part of your brain out, right?

[00:01:09]
It is easier to think big brain thoughts if all of the mechanics of manifesting it on the screen is relatively straightforward and you're not thinking about, how do I get over to that file? Or where is that thing? All those things are kind of distracting you from pulling apart the big problem.

[00:01:27]
And so, what we wanna do today is sit down with most many people's favorite editor. I won't quote all the various different state of JavaScript, surveys, whatever, but like, generally speaking. Much to the chagrin of the Emacs group, Visual Studio Code tends to be a relatively popular editor, and one that I think is worthwhile to sit down and learn.

[00:01:51]
I'm coming from, what'd I say coming from? I mean, like a decade ago, TextMate, so you know, it was only to go up from there. So we're gonna kinda go through everything, all the various different parts of Versus Code. Whether you are brand new to VS code or you've used it all the time, there will probably be something where, that makes my life 1, 2, 10, 75, 1000% easier, right?

[00:02:20]
And we'll kind of cover all the various to various and go into a little more depth than you might in your normal day to day. I think it is worthwhile to spend a little bit of time just sitting down with the tool itself and learning the ins and out of it.

[00:02:32]
A lot of times, we are using the tool while solving some other problem and learning just about enough to get the job done and no more than that. So let's spend some time together. Let's get it, let's learn all the kind of moving pieces. Some things are gonna resonate with you and be like, I'm gonna use it every day.

[00:02:47]
Some things are like, that's good to know, right? And that will be probably slightly different for every single person. But the goal is to figure out how to kind of take this editor and make it yours, right? Not necessarily, I'll show you some of my settings and some of the extensions I use totally, but then also kind of give you the inroads to figure out all the things that you wanna do for your particular use case.

[00:03:09]
Because not only do you probably have different preferences as a human being, that's great. You probably work in various different code bases, maybe it's a full stack type script code base. Maybe it's like, you don't even control the backend, who knows? Maybe you need 17,000 Docker containers to get anything running.

[00:03:26]
These are all things I have dealt with in my life at various points. So kind of look at what those things are and you can kind of pick and choose and craft the experience around that. And no matter what, as I kind of mentioned before, my aspiration is that there is something, many things, a dozen things, depending on you.

[00:03:46]
If you're like, hey, I just came from a jet brains ID to, I'm learning how to code to, I've been doing this really long time. But there's whole parts of VS Code that I don't touch because I don't know what they are, and ain't nobody got time for that, right?

[00:04:00]
So regardless, if you're all front-end, great. If you also need to do some back-end stuff and worry about having containers and stuff along those lines, awesome, we'll kind of navigate all of that together. And by the end, you will be able to kind of navigate around and customize everything to your liking, so on and so forth, right?

[00:04:20]
The high level is, we're gonna talk a little bit about getting around the editor, cuz that's important. We're gonna talk about all of the things that are repetitive and not big brain thoughts, and how to make those as easy as possible, and then making sure that we have consistent environments.

[00:04:36]
If you work on a big enough team, somebody's development environment is broken at all times, right? I meant to get such and such task done, but I couldn't get whatever to spin up. So we'll talk a little bit about how to manage that. And then we're gonna talk a little bit about how to build your own Visual Studio Code extensions because turns out, I'm not going to assume, I am going to assume.

[00:05:00]
And that everyone's got a little passing knowledge of JavaScript, the JavaScript programming language, given that we're on frontendmasters.com. And so, in so far that we relatively know a lot of the moving pieces to make VS code extensions. We'll kind of take a look at that too, cuz maybe you can start building out some of your own tooling.

[00:05:17]
So we'll look at some existing extensions, we'll look at how to build our own extensions. We'll use the editor to build extensions for the editor, it's gonna be great, awesome. So, let's do the businessy stuff, which is we've got a course website. As I said to everyone in the room, the prerequisites, you're probably gonna need to download Visual Studio Code if you don't have it in a full course on Visual Studio Code, that is the one core prerequisite.

[00:05:51]
When we get into some of the container step, if you don't have docker desktop and you would like to do that stuff, you can download it sometime between now and then. There is also this little repository here of little sample silly apps, just because it is hard to explain how to use an editor without something to edit.

[00:06:13]
That said, I would say that if whatever code base that you work on day-to-day, or one that you know your way around, I would open that up to, right? Cuz I think sometimes, it is very hard to simulate a large real-world code base and you might have one.

[00:06:29]
So I think we can apply a lot of those things to our own code bases, so on and so forth.