We’re all familiar with the saying “a bad workman blames his tools”, right?
I’ve learned, through pain, suffering, and i’ll be honest - some humiliation over the years as a developer, that it usually ~Isn’t~ my tools.
So much so - that when something goes wrong now - i’m conditioned to blame myself, and talk myself into the fact that “everyone uses these tools, but only you have this problem with them”.
But sometimes, every now and then, it ~is~ your tools - and your flat out belief that it can’t possibly be this tool that everyone else uses - it must be something you’re doing wrong.
Around 8 months ago, I bought an airbrush - i sprung for a decent one too, not one of these £20 things from amazon. It was to paint tiny little plastic spacemen.
Months go by, i knew there’d be a learning curve, but i’d been getting consistently terrible results with this airbrush the whole time - spitting, clogs, uneven paint. It looked nothing like the results people on youtube would get when they used theirs.
I replaced parts, one by one, until it resembled a ship-of-theseus type situation, until one day, i got fed up, and decided I was going to order a different one and compare.
The new one works, perfectly, out of the box. It’s the best thing ever.
So yeah, sometimes, it ~is~ your tools.
Interrogating your own processes and competence, and being mindful of not just immediately blaming the underlying tools without cause is definitely a prudent way to go through life, but don’t let it become a doctrine that gaslights you into thinking that tools can’t be fundamentally broken.