Learn your tools

One of the biggest things I notice with digital tools is that most people don’t really know how to use them — at least, not beyond the basics.

Apple’s done a great job making their products intuitive, but even then, there are so many deeper settings and shortcuts that can make them work better for you. Most of us just never take the time to explore them.

Then there’s Jira — the tool everyone loves to hate. But honestly, I don’t think the problem is Jira itself. It’s a pretty deep system; it just rarely gets used the way it was meant to be. It’s probably partially the fate of any complex system, if you don’t come in at the ground floor there is just too much to learn and understand so you just make it work how you can.

I see the same thing happen with developers and the WordPress REST API. The REST API is powerful and already built to do so much, yet many devs skip it entirely and write custom endpoints from scratch. It’s not wrong — sometimes it’s necessary — but often it’s just a case of not realizing what’s already available. We end up reinventing the wheel instead of learning how to use the one we’ve got. Part of the problem is the poor documentation, so I get that it’s generally hard to learn it. Picking tools with great documentation should be a goal when choosing a tool.

In the end I would just say as much as possible we should try to learn what a tool offers, why they do things the way they do in order that we might get the most out of them.