On this first blog post, I would like to set the tone for the blog and give you a taste of what to expect from the content you’ll find here.

I want to make sure that beginners don’t get overwhelmed when they start learning how to code. Tutorials and books can sometimes seem daunting and complicated but trust me, it doesn’t need to be.

Understanding software development concepts and techniques doesn’t have to be hard if you are taught the right way.

So if you are ready to learn software development the easy way, strap in and read this short post.

If you have just started with web development, you might have many questions about how the whole thing works. Most tutorials just jump into whatever it is that they are teaching without explaining much of what they’re using.
I’m here to fix that, and that’s why I compiled this list of tools that are commonly used by software developers every single day that makes their lives easy when it comes to writing code

1 – Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is one of the most complete and easy to use code editors around. I’ve worked with other similar code editors like Sublime Text and Atom, but nothing compares to Visual Studio Code, it offers great tools such as an integrated terminal, IntelliSense and my favorite, a merge conflict tool that makes merging code in teams super easy. Don’t worry if most of those things up there didn’t make any sense to you, I left links to articles where you can dive deeper into those topics at the bottom of this blog post, again explained in an easy and understandable way.

2 – XAMPP

XAMPP is by far the easiest way to get started with PHP development without having to worry about all the complexity of setting up an environment capable of running your PHP applications.
In order to better explain what this tool does, I’ll list the meaning of each initial on its name.
X-  Cross-platform
A-  Apache
M- MariaDB
P-  PHP
P- Perl
The XAMPP package basically saves us a lot of time by bundling everything we need to start a web project. There is no need to install individual versions of the software we need and making sure that the versions work well together. We don’t need to worry about updating individual programs either. It’s all ready for us, for free, just a double click away.

3 – Browser developer tools

This is something that you might not have known but your browser is one of the most powerful debugging tools in a web developers arsenal.
Most modern web browsers offer a suite of developer tools to help with debugging, testing and optimizing your web applications. The best in my opinions is the Google Chrome Developer Tools, a tool a wrote an entire article about that you can find here.

4  – NPM

Node Package Manager is basically a collection of useful packages that you can install on your NodeJs application to help you with some tasks instead of having to write the whole functionality on your own.

These packages can help you with doing things like easily build an API or add colors to your console to make it look cool.

5  – Git

Git is what the industry calls a version-control system. What this system does is allow a team to collaborate on files across different computers.
Software developers use this tool to collaborate on source code they write for an application.
Some of the benefits of using a version-control system like Git is that it allows you to revert your mistakes. For example: you build a web app and put it online. People start using it, they love what you built and everything is great. A month later one of the packages(like the ones you can get on NPM) you are using is updated and you want to use the latest version because it’s twice as fast as the previous one. You update your app, redeploy it and then it happens, some users seem to be having problems using your app on older browsers like they used to, and those users actually represent 60% of your user base. You just spent hours changing your code and there aren’t enough CTRL + Zs out there to save you.
Well, if you were using Git to manage your source code, all you have to do is run a revert command and bam, you’re back to the previous version that works.

This is a very brief description of some of the most important tools every web developer should know about. I’ll add links to more in-depth articles about these tools if you are interested.

Thank you for reading! 😀

Resources

These resources are mostly linked to Wikepedia articles because I’d like to offer a less technical overview of these tools. There will be posts on this blog that are more technical but easy to understand. I’ll add those to this list as they come out.

Our article on how to merge using git

Wikipedia article about Visual studio code

Wikepedia article about XAMPP

The official Chrome DevTools page Chrome Developer Tools. You can also read about the features of the tool here

Wikepedia article about NPM

Wikepedia article about NodeJS

In depth definition of Git and more details about it by Wikepedia