“Stories activate the imagination and engage emotions. A story activates parts in the brain that can make a listener turn the story into their own experience.” - Growth Zone

What is Stories?

Stories is a social media feature that allows users to tell a story by sharing images, background text, short video clips, AR facial filters, and gifs. It appears for just 24 hours, and you could view, react, or comment on the story before it disappears.

Stories originally came into existence through Snapchat (My Story) in 2013 and was later adopted by Instagram(IG) Stories and Facebook(FB) Stories which has now become the most used social media feature in the world. Other social media platforms that have stories include:

• TikTok
• WhatsApp (Status)
• LinkedIn Stories
• YouTube Stories
• Slack Stories
• Twitter (Fleets) ; I honestly would prefer tweeting without it, but the good news is I don't have a say.

And viola! The unexpected ones that came to say hello world which has gotten different reactions from Developers, the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) Stories, and GitHub Stories.

• VS Code stories : An open source extension for Visual Studio Code by Ben Awad, is used to add stories to VS Code. Here is an introductory video he made. Why does one even need stories in a code editor/IDE? As funny or weird as it sounds I had a rethink and it's pretty awesome, keep reading.

• GitHub stories: This is quite new, I woke up to a tweet by Chidi Williams who took to Twitter to introduce GitHub stories . A google chrome extension that allows users to see what their favorite GitHub handle is doing straight from their GitHub dashboard. Although not affiliated to GitHub, GitHub is both a code sharing, publishing service, and a social networking site for programmers. So hey, why not?

Here is my thought in a nutshell, I believe introducing stories to development environments has its underlying advantages in the long run.

1. Coders can take out time to unwind rather than switching to another app and get carried away.
2. Developers can get inspiration while working on a project or seek opinions on a code and get feedback.
3. An avenue to showcase what you are working on and get more people to know about it.
4. It can help improve your creativity.
5. To promote your product or service.

Stories are used on different platforms in different ways to entertain, engage, and delight your audience. How you use yours will determine the outcome.

Leave a comment, what do you think about the stories for VS Code and GitHub?