Over the past few months, I have tried to find ways to be more productive during my coding sessions. Usually, trying to be more productive would just mean writing code and learning something new. However, after my major project during my last semester of school, I found out the hard way that the old way of doings things was not working out well.

The major problem at the time became that I did not have a good tool set in order to make coding easier. My main editor for programming was simple Gedit. I had started using a more minimalist route years ago during my experience writing C++ code with Visual Studio. I didn't not want to be tied down to a tool, especially one that was really buggy. I started writing my coding assignments using Gedit and then compiling the code with g++; I did use Anjuta sometimes but not that often. However, managing larger code bases using that same approach does not work.

Refactoring code was a mess just using Gedit and no autocompletion or documenation look up forced me to search for documentation on Google a lot. Nowadays, I am using GVim for making smaller edits while I am still learning how to use it and NetBeans for project management; PIDA is also a pretty good Vim option for Python development. Refactoring code is so much easier with either program and both programs can perform autocompletion as well as documentation look up and easy navigation to declarations of functions.

Also, I finally have started using tools and performing practices that I should be better acquainted with by now. I have started writing tests as a part of my standard coding practices. Tests are now at least done for the main models of an application. Learning more about testing has really helped with my old YouTubed-2x application since now I have a lot easier way to test for broken parsers. Although, I need to learn more about writing meaningful tests as well as documentation.

A type of tool that I really should have used sometime during my schooling was a debugger. However, I made it through undergrad without ever using a debugger on a project. My debugger of choice was print. To fix this problem, I had forced myself to learn how to use a debugger and my tests have shown me just how important debugging code is and how much easier using a debugger is as opposed to writing text to stdout/stderr. Using a debugger allowed me to fix a couple of long standing bugs in YouTubed-2x that have existed for well over a year. My favorite Python debugger is Winpdb; the debugger in Eric IDE is also good but I have found Eric to be unstable on my system.

Besides learning a lot, what I have been doing has already helped me fix issues that I have had in my projects. I feel like I can approach problems much more easily now and develop solutions more quickly. I feel like I have leveled up over the past few months. Hopefully, these experiments will help in the process of getting a job.