Pieces User Stories: Keeping track of great ideas

Commander Mark has been here since the beginning. As one of our founding engineers, he spends most of his time deep in the code, and the rest of his time talking about code with the rest of the team.

Mark uses Pieces every day, and the way he uses it shifts constantly. “Right now, I use Pieces to save a lot of my responses that are not available on the web. Specifically with any sort of command I would use with the G Cloud APIs, as well as small templates of code, like my try catches— I’ll actually just right-click, hit “Send to Pieces” and auto-complete them into IntelliJ, VS Code or any one of my editors.”

While looking through his saved snippets, nearly every one elicits, “So this is a really useful snippet.” And when asked how he could use them without Pieces, Mark seems stumped.

“I have no clue… I would probably try to find it— let’s say I was in a project in a couple months and I needed to find this, I’d have to remember exactly where the files is, and that may take a lot of guess-and-check instead of just going to Pieces and searching for ‘docker build.’ And then it’s right there.”

But that’s just for his own snippets — as part of our engineering team, Mark is constantly sharing snippets and swapping links to interesting articles and helpful packages. Frequently, someone slacks Mark a link that he wants to re-use. It’s easy to quickly lose track of links and snippets in Slack, so he saves them in Pieces.

“This is the retry package that I can use for all of my retry logic; I did not want it to get lost in my billion Slack messages, so I just took that package, sent it [to Pieces] and renamed it.”

Bam. Now it’s easy to find and re-use later, and Mark can stay deep in the code.