Mike BifulcoThis is Tiny Improvements. I'm Mike by ko Growing up. I spent a lot of time in the garage with my dad. He's a man of many projects and hardly a weekend went past where I wasn't helping them work on something from cars to household repairs, to lawn work, to tinkering with electronics. I learned a lot about tools and how to use them. And I learned that the right tool for the job can make all the difference. There were two things that he always used to tell me.
First power tools are always out to get you. They may feel like they'll help get the job done fast, but they're powerful and they don't care about your fingers. Respect them and act as though they're always trying to hurt you. Second. There's nothing worse than having to fix your tools. If you take care of your tools, they'll take care of you. Keep them clean, sharp and in good working order. These are both true. And while rule number one is less applicable to software tools.
Rule number two is absolutely something that I've found to be true in my career as a software engineer. The tools we use to get our work done are incredibly important and taking the time to tune them to work just right. Can make a huge difference in our productivity and happiness. Tuning your tools just feels good. I use visual studio code for nearly all of my coding and writing. I love it because it's quick and customizable and it just works. Well, no shade. If you're a fan of VIM, you do, you.
I dig vs code and I've spent some time recently changing up my setup to make it even better. Here's a few of the things I've done recently to tune my vs code experience. The Houston theme. There is an installed theme for vs code called Houston, which was actually made by the team that makes Astro. If you prefer a dark theme and like some spicy neon accent colors, you might like Houston. Zen mode. Is that mode for vs code is a great way to tune your IDE to be more focused.
I use it for writing articles and newsletters. It's built into vs code. So you don't even need to install anything, just press command, K, and then Z to enter Zen mode or use the command palette and type in toggles and mode. Straight out of the box. Zen mode is pretty damn minimal and that's not for everyone. Myself included. You can customize InMode by opening up vs code settings with command comma, and then searching for Zen mode.
There's a number of settings within there that you can use to do things like center the layout, make it go to full screen mode, hide the activity bar, hide line numbers. You name it. Next up pieces for vs code. Pieces is amazing. It's a contextualized note-taking app and code copilot that helps you store annotate and generate code snippets in your IDE.
Not only is it context aware as in it knows what you're working on and as well as the places where you're doing research, but it also features an on-device privacy first LLM that can generate code snippets and notes without sending your data to the cloud. That's pretty cool. If pieces sounds familiar, you probably know about it because of my interview with their founder, salvo, not on software engineering daily, a few months back. And definitely not from Scott.
Hanselman's recent podcast about it. No shade to Scott. I think it's a good idea to get your tools to a place where you're happy using them for you that might mean that you're already set for other people, it might mean toggling every setting and making everything just so, so that they feel at home. Like that says you should keep two things in mind. The pointy tools are always out to get you and the ones that you really want to use all the time should be ready to be used.
So make sure they're in good working order. And the next time you pick up a project to work on, you'll be much happier for it. In the end, if you're happy doing your work, that's all that should really matter. If you end up spending some time customizing your IDE, I'd love it. If you shot me a message about it, you can email me at hello@mikebifulco.com or find me on threads at irreverent. Mike. Thanks so much.