Chapter 2
Get Your Tools in Order

Tools don’t make a programmer great any more than a fancy guitar makes a guitarist great. Put me on the fanciest guitar you can find, and I’ll make it sound like a washtub full of cats. But have you noticed that most great guitarists still have swank gear?

Great programmers are passionate about their tools in the same way. The right tools multiply the productivity of a great programmer. If you have the skills and a small effort can crank up your output to eleven, you’d be crazy not to take advantage of it, right?

This chapter introduces tools common to all software work. The time you invest in considering each tool discussed here will repay itself many, many times over during your career. You should also keep the same openness of mind in the years ahead; new tools will be created that may serve you better, or your career may take you into specialized realms where a different tool is better suited to the work.

Productivity Multipliers vs. Dividers

I talk a lot about multiplying your productivity by using tools better. However, there’s a trap that programmers can fall into: endlessly fiddling with their tools instead of getting work done. I’ve seen elaborate setups with virtual desktops, integrated development environments, remote file replication, and all kinds of mess that never seems to work quite right—yet the programmer keeps fiddling with it when he would be much better off if he’d run vi and just start programming.

With any plan to multiply your productivity, you need to draw a line in the sand; at some point, if it’s not delivering, scrap it and move on. Keep in mind this balance: what’s the fancy, productivity-multiplying solution? And what’s the simplest thing that could possibly work? Give the fancy solution a fixed amount of time, and if that time expires, revert to simple.

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