Baldur Nil
Mobile software engineer.
Certainly one of the things is to keep building stuff. I’ve recently decided to write a small app (I went for a clone app because I don’t want to deal with designing it) and it has really forced me to learn SwiftUI (I’ve only used UIKit professionally), while previously I’d read articles without much reason to hold on to them.
So if you want to learn something, find a project that will force you to learn that thing, but if the purpose is to learn, don’t try to make it an “original idea” or something like that. It would only lead to procrastination. Find an existing tool that makes use of what you want to learn and try to implement it yourself.
TumbleOS
Yeah, I guess the idea of VSCode isn’t to be a “ready to use” IDE, but to be configurable — which it is.
The main thing that makes it popular nowadays is the ecosystem of plugins around it. Ex: when Copilot was released, I believe the VSCode plugin was the best one.
Also many frameworks docs have instructions on how to use it with VSCode and which plugins to install, such as some web frameworks and Flutter.
They didn’t even bother to do a gradual rollout, like even small apps do.
The level of company-wide incompetence is astounding, but considering how organizations work and disregard technical people’s concerns, I’m never surprised when these things happen. It’s a social problem more than a technical one.
This is the right answer. To complement it, I’d just say I’ve read someone before say that at Microsoft there’s no incentive to squeeze performance, so why bother if it won’t help you get promoted or get a bonus? All these things add up over time to make Windows only care about it when there is actually a huge bottleneck.
It’s also worth noting (for non programmers out there) that speed has no correlation with the amount of code. Often it’s actually the opposite: things start simple and begin to grow in complexity and amount of code exactly to squeeze more optimizations for specific use-cases.