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Markdown - The Most Important Tool In My Toolbox.md

Markdown - The Most Important Tool In My Toolbox

As a software developer myself, I've found that markdown is the most important tool in my toolbox. It's the glue that holds everything together. It's the key to keeping my projects organized and on track. Every day, I interact with people who build, use, maintain, support or manage the software my team builds. Markdown is the language that allows us to communicate with them. And because it's a content first format, it's the perfect tool for the job. My team uses markdown to write user guides, support docs and readmes. We use it in our pull requests, issues, slack messages and even in our code comments. When we have to write something for confluence so stakeholders can access it, we put it in a markdown file and publish it there. If confluence isn't available, we still have our source code and markdown files to refer to.

I first got acquainted with markdown when I created an account on github in 2010. At the time I was working as the software development manager for LandsEnd.com. It was a waterfall IT shop with a few of us starting to advocate for an agile transformation. During peak season, I spent most of my days with business and IT stakeholders in planning meetings. At then end of the day, I had to compile my notes into tasks I had to accomplish in order to plan and schedule resources or provide estimates for the work. I experimented with too many note taking and task management systems to name, but nothing really saved me that much time. That's when I came up with the idea to take notes in markdown and use TODO comments to create a kanban board. The year was 2011.

Since then, I gradually used markdown more and more in my work and along the way the community and market provided tons of tools to make it more versatile and easy to maintain. Here are a few of my favorites:

  1. Imdone - A kanban board that uses markdown files on your filesystem to manage your work.
  2. Markdown Here - A browser extension that lets you write emails in markdown.
  3. Markdown All in One - A Visual Studio Code extension that provides a ton of features for working with markdown.

You can find more here: Markdown Guide

So double down on markdown, because it's here to stay!

Imdone for now ;) Jesse

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