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As a QA Engineer, Ben is familiar with how software is supposed to work— as he dives into development, Pieces has become super useful to his learning process.
Pieces has been most helpful to Ben when searching for help online. “What's so cool about coding is you can think a thought and type it straight into StackOverflow or Google, and you can find someone who's done something that’s relatively close to what you’re trying to do. For me, Pieces bridges those gaps in knowledge between what I know and what someone else knows. If I’m watching a YouTube video on how to build a TreeView in IntelliJ, their solution isn’t going to be an exact solution for my problem, but I can get the outline of it, screenshot that YouTube video, send it to Pieces, convert it to code, and edit that code within Pieces. I can even directly access it from my IDE or share it with somebody else.”
Pieces has been especially helpful as Ben experiments with building Flutter applications. It’s super easy for him to save widgets, add some context and re-use them later. “I go through and rename things, add a useful description and so on. Something that I find really powerful is Related Links. Then I can just copy the code from Pieces and slap it into the project.”
Ben also uses Pieces to communicate with other members of the team by quickly sending snippets that everyone can reference again later. “If you ask me for an example of some kind of pop up menu, I can copy one and send it over with a Pieces link. And then or you can be like, ‘Hey, I'm looking at this scaffold that I've got right now, and I'm getting this error.’ And you could easily put the details of the error in the description and share that full snippet to me. I can see that, and it's like a real-time PR that I can send back to you with the correction on it. Then you can continue on developing.”
Ben realizes that he won’t always have all the answers. “I'm a firm believer in like, know some of it, know most of it, but know where to find the rest of the information.” For him, that’s Pieces.
