How and why you should tool-up: time spent sharpening your axe is never wasted
There‘s an old parable about two lumberjacks in a tree-cutting contest. The first one worked tirelessly, never taking a break, while the second took a 15 minute break every hour. At the end of the day, the second lumberjack had cut down significantly more trees. Surprised, the first lumberjack asked how this was possible. The second responded: "Every time I took a break, I sharpened my axe."
As a full-stack developer with over a decade of experience, I‘ve found this to be the perfect metaphor for how to maximize productivity and code quality. Taking the time to "sharpen your axe" — that is, improving your tools, skills and workflows — makes you significantly more effective in the long run.
In this article, I‘ll share how you can apply this "tool-up" philosophy to full-stack development. I‘ll discuss what types of tools provide the biggest productivity boosts, guidelines for selecting and creating your own tools, and how to cultivate a mindset of continuous tooling improvement.
The power of proper tooling
The impact of tooling on developer productivity and code quality is immense. Research from Stripe found that:
- Developers spend over 30% of their time dealing with maintenance, technical debt, and bad code
- Developers at top-performing companies have access to better tools and spend 20% more time on new work
Those numbers quantify what most developers feel every day: we waste a lot of time wrestling with clunky workflows and cleaning up messes. Having effective tooling is a big differentiator.
But just how big of a differentiator is it? Here are some eye-opening statistics from studies by Jetbrains:
- 81% of developers say good tools are a key factor in job satisfaction
- Developers who are happy with their tools are 65% more likely to be happy at work in general
- Dissatisfaction with tools correlates with a nearly 50% increase in job burnout
So not only does proper tooling make you more productive, it literally makes you enjoy your work more and hate your life less. If that‘s not a compelling case for investing in your tools, I don‘t know what is!
Selecting the right tools
So what constitutes "proper tooling" for a full-stack developer? Obviously the specifics depend a lot on your tech stack, but here are some general categories of tools that are almost universally high-impact:
IDEs and text editors
For most devs, their editor is their primary tool. A great one can make you feel like you have superpowers while a bad one…well, the less said the better. In the 2021 StackOverflow survey, the top 5 most popular options were:
- Visual Studio Code (71.01%)
- Visual Studio (33.03%)
- Notepad++ (29.71%)
- IntelliJ (28.91%)
- Sublime Text (28.43%)
Personally, I‘m a big fan of VS Code for full-stack work. It‘s lightweight, customizable, and has an amazing ecosystem of extensions. I can‘t count how many times the Prettier and ESLint extensions have saved me from myself.
Testing and debugging tools
Writing tests and chasing down bugs are two of the biggest time sinks in development. Having good tools for these tasks is an absolute must. Some standouts:
- Postman for API testing and development
- React DevTools for inspecting React component hierarchies
- Vue DevTools for debugging Vue applications
- Redux DevTools for time-travel debugging of Redux state
- ndb for debugging Node.js via Chrome DevTools
- Flipper for debugging mobile apps
The Chrome DevTools deserve a special mention here. They‘re an indispensable part of my toolkit as a full-stack developer, particularly for front-end work. Honing your skills with the DevTools will pay massive dividends.
Build tools and package managers
The JavaScript world is notorious for its overwhelming array of build tools and package managers. But a few have emerged as clear winners:
- npm for managing Node.js package dependencies
- Webpack for bundling and optimizing assets
- Babel for transpiling modern JavaScript to backwards-compatible code
- Create React App and Next.js for quickly bootstrapping React projects
On the back-end side of things, you can‘t go wrong with tried-and-true tools like Maven for Java and pip for Python.
The key with these tools is to understand what they‘re doing under the hood. It‘s tempting to treat them as magic boxes, but that will come back to bite you when things inevitably go wrong. Take the time to learn the fundamentals of module bundling, transpilation, dependency resolution, etc.
Containers and infrastructure-as-code
The DevOps revolution has majorly upended how we build and deploy software, with containerization and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) being two of the biggest game changers. Some tooling essentials in this space:
- Docker for packaging applications into portable container images
- Kubernetes for container orchestration and management
- Terraform for provisioning cloud infrastructure
- Ansible and Chef for configuration management
- Jenkins, CircleCI, and GitLab CI/CD for continuous integration and delivery
A lot of these tools have a steep learning curve, but they‘re incredibly powerful once you know how to wield them. Being able to define your entire application environment as code and spin it up on demand is a superpower for development and debugging.
Creating your own tools
As useful as off-the-shelf tooling is, you‘ll inevitably run into situations where there‘s no existing tool that quite fits the bill. That‘s where the "tool up" mindset really comes into its own.
I can‘t count how many times I‘ve written a small script or utility to automate away some recurring source of friction in my workflows. These have ranged from code generators to log parsers to chatbots that can query application data.
The key is to always be on the lookout for these opportunities. Whenever you find yourself thinking "I wish there was a tool to do X", that‘s a sign you might need to roll your own.
Here‘s a concrete example from my work. I was on a team building a large React application and we were constantly running into a particular performance issue. The root cause was easy to spot in the React DevTools, but it required a lot of manual traversal of the component tree.
After one too many tedious bug hunts, I wrote a small script that would automatically walk the tree and highlight components that met a certain performance threshold. It probably took me an hour to write, but it saved the team countless hours of debugging time over the following months.
That said, it‘s important not to go overboard with custom tooling. Always weigh the time it will take to build and maintain a tool against the time it will save you. A good rule of thumb is the 2x rule: a tool should save you at least twice as much time as it takes to create.
It‘s also important to be judicious about the scope and complexity of your tools. Over-engineering is a real danger, especially for software developers who are naturally inclined to build for imagined future use cases. Fight that urge and focus on solving the problem in front of you as simply as possible. You can always iterate later if needed.
The tool-oriented mindset
Beyond any specific tool or technique, the most important thing is to cultivate a mindset of continual tooling improvement. Always be looking for opportunities to sharpen your axe, both by adopting new tools and by honing your skills with the ones you already use.
One way to do this is to set aside dedicated "tool time" in your schedule. This could be an hour every Friday afternoon or 20 minutes each morning – whatever works for you. Use this time to experiment with a new tool, automate a workflow, or just read up on tooling best practices.
Another approach is to treat your tools as first-class citizens of your development process. That means things like:
- Including tooling improvements in your definition of done for user stories
- Dedicating sprints or Kanban lanes to tooling work
- Tracking key metrics around tool usage and productivity
- Holding demos and retrospectives focused on tooling
The exact tactics will vary depending on your team‘s processes, but the key is to make sure tooling isn‘t an afterthought. It should be a core part of how you work.
Sharpening your axe, day after day
Like the wise woodcutter in the parable, you want to make axe-sharpening a regular habit. Tools are not a one-and-done investment, but an area of continual growth and improvement throughout your career.
Sometimes that improvement will come through major adoptions, like migrating to a new front-end framework. Other times it will be small optimizations, like tweaking your editor configs. The impact of each individual change may seem minor, but they compound over time in a big way.
It‘s also worth noting that sharpening your axe gets easier the more you do it. As you develop your skills and tooling muscle memory, you‘ll start to see potential improvements everywhere. What once seemed like minor annoyances will become obvious opportunities to optimize.
Ultimately, keeping your tools sharp is about much more than just productivity. It‘s about craftsmanship, pride in your work, and continual growth as a developer. And those are worthy investments no matter how you slice it.
So always be sharpening. Your future self (and your fellow developers) will thank you.