I’ve been doing a lot of DIY lately, after we had some building work done. Painting walls, laying new flooring, putting on new skirting boards, putting up new blinds and curtain rails. I’m not very practical, so my Father-in-Law is usually drafted in to help. One thing has become abundantly clear.

It’s all about having the right tools.

About 6 years ago when we moved into this house we turned the old owner’s kids bedroom into a grown up guest room. In the process we put coving up. This involves cutting stuff at 45 degree angles to make corners. When we did the coving, we used a Coving Mitre:

This is an odd shaped bit of plastic which can be layed at various positions on the coving to guide a hand-saw into cutting the right angle. It’s fiddly, and a pain in the ass to be honest. And because you are hand-sawing it’s hard work, and you can’t just nibble a couple of millimetres off. It was a long hard job.

A year or so later, when we put up some Dado Rail in another room my Father-in-Law had bought a Mitre Saw:

This makes it a lot easier to keep the saw in the right position and cut the angles. It clamps the wood in place. It made the job much faster. But it’s still impossible to cut a couple of Millimetres off a slightly too long piece of dado.

Last week, we put up skirting boards. Now my Father-in-Law has bought a Power Mitre Saw:

With this bitch you can do anything. It’s trivial to cut any angle in anything. You can trim a millimetre off the end of a bit of skirting in a second. It makes the job faster and easier.

When we were laying the flooring. My Father-in-Law cracked out his jigsaw and a Square (thing for getting right angles dead straight). Tools I don’t have, I’d have struggled with a big handsaw, a hacksaw and a steel ruler. And it would have taken ages and been crap.

It’s all about having the right tools.

Since this experience, I’ve decided. There is no point in doing a DIY chore without the right tools. And it’s no use going for the cheap-o option (the Coving Mitre) I need to get something decent. The Manual Mitre Saw would have been the best option, balance of cost and utility.

I’ve bought a cordless drill with a set of drill bits and screwdriver bits. I’ve bought a spirit level. I’ve bought a hacksaw and numerous other tools I’ve been doing without. The DIY I’ve been doing since has been much much more productive. I had to assemble some flatpack furniture yesterday. Normally a chore that takes hours and leaves me with hands sore from the screwing in of a million screws.

Yesterday, I used my cordless power drill and a couple of screw driver packs and had everything together in no time at all. Today, I put the curtains and blinds back up. Screwing them in took seconds, and I used the big spirit level with the built in ruler to make sure they’re level and centred on the window. And it took much less time than the blind I put up in our bedroom a couple of years ago, which wasn’t straight.

I still have to get my Father-in-Law round to do something if I’ve not done it before, and to show me what the right tools for the job are. But, my DIY is light years ahead of where it was 6 years ago.

It’s all about the having the right tools and knowing when to use which tool.

This isn’t just true of DIY. Take photography. When it comes to taking pictures of small children, you need the right camera. I’ve got an old 4 megapixel Nikon Coolpix 4300 at the moment. I bought it before my kids were born, and used to take pictures of landscapes on holiday, or us by the pool on holiday. Great camera, lots of control over what it does.

But it’s useless for taking pictures of kids. They don’t stay still looking cute for more than 2 seconds at a time, and the shutterlag on the Coolpix is about 3-4 seconds with a 10 second minimum delay between taking shots. It’s a useless tool for taking pictures of little kids.

It’s not just true of photography and DIY, it’s true of software engineering. Sure, you could write a full blown replacement for Microsoft Office using a command line compiler and notepad. But it would take orders of magnitude more effort than doing so using a rich IDE, powerful debugging tools and suites of standard components.

I know that I’ve said that coding is not like building a house. But, there are things they do share in common, such as the impact of trying to do a quality job in a decent time with the wrong tools.

It’s important that as a programmer, you have the right tools and you use them for the right job. Make sure that you are using the best programming editor for your language, if you aren’t, get the best or as near it as your budget will go. Make sure you have a debugger, profiler, lint tool, test tool. Make sure you have all the tools, and make sure you know how to use them. If you do, you’ll soon be producing better software faster.

If you aren’t, it’s not the right tool, or you’re not using it at the right stage.

Popularity: 35% [?]

This is version 2 of this entry and was posted 1 year, 5 months ago on Sunday, April 29th, 2007 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Opinion, Programming Tools. It's popularity ranking is Popularity: 35% [?]. It has been tagged with Development, tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. You can see changes since the last version here.