Once upon a time in my life I played chess. I still do on lichess.org at times, but back in the day I would travel across the US to play in tournaments. Mind you, I was never very good, but for quite a few tournaments my rating settled at a point just below the cutoff point where you were required to play in the open bracket. Had I been just a little bit better, I would have lost many more games..
Flash forward a few years and I decided to read a bit of a book on "how to become a grandmaster" Now I don't remember which book this was, but I do remember that it said something along the following lines:
A grandmaster must commit almost all of his time to chess. In addition, a grandmaster can only choose to study the solution to so many endgames. This is because once he has completed studying for a few years, everytime he learns a new solution to an endgame he will begin to forget an old one. In some sense, he can load only so many solutions into memory, once he has done this he has to begin to discard old memories. Thus, the grandmaster must choose to study the most frequently occurring endgames in his meta.
In the same way, this is true of the process of programming. You can have only so many tools at your disposal, abstraction as functions, macros, 50 hotkeys that do different things, etc. Once you start to get too many tools you start to forget about all the tools you have. So part of this blog will be a journey to figure out what are the tools that are the most essential to a programmer.
To be continued with a list of the best set of tools, and maybe even more importantly a list of tools you SHOULD NOT use.