Mar 7, 2023
Building great dev tools, in part, comes from understanding that all devs aren’t the same. This impacts what we’re building at Skyramp in a variety of ways. We’ve alluded in past blogs that the pain points of testing APIs and microservices are relative to the skill set or simply the mindset of the dev. There is also a lot of variation among IDE preferences. Generally, we’ll start by meeting devs where they live statistically, and then make sure we have coverage for alternatives.
Case in point: one of our upcoming tools is designed to take the pain out of API and microservices mocking and imbue it with unique capabilities. We’re building a VSCode plugin for this tool. One of our devs commented that he’s tried to use many IDE tools including VSCode in its early days, and that he is way more productive with VIM than any other IDEs. To him, VSCode is better than VIM for beginners while VIM is better than VSCode when it comes to fast, efficient text editing. He argues that with know-how VIM can be set up with features equivalent or better than VSCode.
And he’s probably right, BUT … there are a LOT of VSCode users. We want Skyramp tools to meet them where they live, and that’s why we’re building a plugin.
One size does NOT fit all, and if you’re in the business of making life easier for devs — giving them more time to do what they prefer, i.e. build — you’ve got to offer tools granular and flexible enough to fit into their world, and not the other way around.