Several years ago, I interviewed for a job in the Web development department at WorldComm.  They asked me what my favorite HTML editor was, and I said "Notepad."  They strongly approved of that answer, and I think that was the right answer for that time. I'm not so sure about today.

Even up to the last couple of years, I prided myself on saying that I only used Dreamweaver for the line numbers.  I hand-wrote all my SQL, never popping open the query editor in Access or SQL Server.  And I think that when I was in the learning stages, this was probably the right approach.  To me, it's akin to doing all your arithmatic by hand until you get to advanced Algebra, Trigonometry, and Calculus.  You need to understand what the basic operations are, where the answers come from, and roughly what to expect.  But at some point you have all that cold and doing it by hand is just hubris—wasting time and brain cells in grunt work you can have your computer do.

I finally started to realize this when Adobe stopped development on Authorware.  In a lot of ways, Authorware was an amazing tool.  One of its features was that it could operate on its own code, from a simple widget to copy motion path from one icon to another to an external application that could build an entire eLearning course based on data in a database.  I built a lot of tools in Authorware that automated repetitive tasks to free me to do the things that actually required skill, but when I used other software I was ignoring the tools that the developers of that software had included for the same purpose.

When I started to use other tools on a daily basis, I discovered some interesting things.  The query builder in Access allowed me to easily build queries that I wouldn't have even begun to know how to go about writing by hand, and I was able to build simpler queries much faster as well.  In both Access and SQL Server, the query builder/designer allows you to see what fields are available to you without having to know off the top of your head the structure of all the tables.  When a database has hundreds of tables, that's a significant time saver.  In SQL Server Management Express, the query designer allows me to alias a table after setting up the joins, without the risk of missing a reference.  

Code completion in Dreamweaver saves time not just in typing, but also in looking up the correct syntax and in debugging that one character typo. In design view, I can locate the bit of asp code that populates a particular table cell far faster than I'd be able to do by manually scanning through all of the code.  I still don't use design view quite as often as I should, but I make a conscious effort to use whatever timesaving tools I have at my disposal.

My name is Amy, and I am was a hand-code-aholic.

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