Pieces User Stories: Augment Programming Documentation
From research solutions to sharing code with context, Pieces for Developers has helped Moon in nearly every part of her workflow.
Junior developer Moon is still experimenting with her workflow to figure out what works for her, but Pieces always seems to find its place. These days, Moon uses Pieces while she’s researching her latest projects.
“Let's say I'm searching for code online. Maybe the article wasn't well written or the documentation isn't all that great, because, let's be honest, the programming documentation out there isn’t always that great,” says Moon. “It's really helpful to just copy and paste a piece of code into Pieces and get a more definitive answer as to what the language is, what the related links and tags are, and other stuff that Pieces generates to get more context about the code. Sometimes I don't want to read all the documentation. I just want quick, short, simple answers as to what this thing does.”
Once she has the context she needs, Moon can add that snippet right into her code. While she generally prefers to write out all of her code, as it helps her to really think through the logic of her projects, Pieces is still quite helpful for her to save the snippets that don’t have that much logic behind them. “Pieces is helpful for saving shell commands, bash commands, and CLI commands in general. I also save things like SSH keys, authentication tokens, and more secret and sensitive stuff.”
However, the code that Moon writes still makes its way into her Pieces repo. “The way I work, I do enough research to know what I'm writing. I do screenshot code for future use— not only for my use, but also for my friends. It turns out to be way easier to have code in Pieces than to have to open my IDE every time find a piece of code.”
But, Moon’s most-used Pieces feature? Extracting code from screenshots with OCR. “I don't know, it's just easier for me to take a screenshot of code and run it through OCR, as opposed to doing all this, copy, paste it into Pieces, yada yada yada. I already have a lot of coding screenshots taken for research, so it’s a lot easier for me to just drag and drop the picture into Pieces.”
