Setting Standards for Success!

At this point in time, I’ve now completed a week’s worth of coding with ESLint and VSCode. I’ve worked with both individually in the past, but it’s always been to a more shallow level compared to here. As such, it’s viable to have new impressions when working with these tools, because they are being used in differing ways compared to what I’m normally used to.

First Impressions

When working with VSCode, the one immediate difference between my first and current uses of VSCode are the use of extensions. Initially, I had only enabled the bare skeletal minimum required for a class, which would be just a python compiler. Here though, because we’re working in HTML, we’re using other tools that are useful to augment our productivity - particularly HTML boilerplate which serves as a template for HTML compiling, and Github Copilot, an AI that helps us read and improve our code. These are interesting to note with and I believe they serve to help augment my productivity when going through coding problems. However, there is another tool we’ve started using to help our code out, one that challenges us to be more professional. That tool is the ability to lint your code.

On linting…

The ability to lint your code, in my eyes, is a necessary evil. By no means is linting easy, as it often requires you to rethink and rebuild you entire code in order to satisfy it. However, the thing to note about linting is that frankly, it is guaranteed to make your code better should you comply. This ultimately makes using linting worthy, even in spite of the endless frustration that arises from it, as I personally believe that holding yourself to some level of standard is necessary in getting good at a skill. After all, it’s nicer to move into a house that has been held to safety standards to ensure it’s structural integrity compared to a house that still functions as a house, but may hide nasty surprises due to a lack of standard.