Sergi, our Intern and student from Leiden university, who is currently finalizing his 2nd internship at WeAreFrank! gives us insight to his experience with Visual Studio Code.
As part of Sergi’s internship, he is working on a project called the Frank!Flow. The idea behind the Frank!Flow is to make a visual representation of a Frank!Configuration and allow users to drag and drop elements to build Franks!. The Frank!Flow will benefit anyone using the Frank!Framework, resulting in time saving and less energy thinking.
Sergi explained that due to covid the team have less physical contact and their meetings are held via teams, this means that as a team we have more limited interaction.
During one of their morning stand-ups the team were talking about their code and making some changes to it. Sergi suggested it would be a good idea if they could re-factor the code together. But then came the question; how they could achieve this. Would it be via Teams and share their screen individually?
The team had previously concluded that they would use VSCode after having looked at using a different IDE, such as Eclipse or Intelij. During Sergi’s studies he had the opportunity to experience working on VSCode, and he thought it was very versatile and more adaptable for front-end development.
Now that the Frank!Flow team had chosen what IDE they would be using for refactoring their code, it then came to the point that they would do this joint effort together. As a team they decided they would try out Visual Studio Code with a “live share” extension.
Sergi said “While re-factoring it was very easy to keep track of what we were doing as a team". “What the live share does, is it shows you the blinking cursor, of where your teammate is editing”. “You can also follow someone with this feature, duplicate your screen and have two editors’ side by side.” “On one screen you can track what your teammate is doing, and on the other hand you can keep developing/ programming.”
Sergi felt It was nice to see how we were all contributing while simultaneously, re-factoring the code, developing and giving each other live feedback.
The learning experience of this was giving each other direct feedback as we were refactoring, we wanted to create the best solution. With the live share we could have feedback immediately, it felt like a real time code review. The Frank!Flow team experienced and decided they would regularly use the VSCode live share for refactoring and giving each other direct and live feedback.