When you set out to create a great website, you first sketch out your ideas. Then, with some research, you begin to find designs and features that fit what you’re trying to capture in user experience.
In 2020, open-source software will continue to draw millions of collaborative developers. Leveraging these tools, contributing to their respective repositories, and opening your codebase to revisions from others will strengthen not only your own projects but the industry as a whole.
Web developers can create amazing user experiences. Brands can radically increase their company’s profile.
Improving web experiences for customers can help the perception of your brand. How people perceive your business is so important.
Therefore, you’ll want to hire top web developers who leverage the latest tools. Frontend and backend alike constantly change and evolve. You cannot rely on older tech to make your software products.
1. Sass
For professional developers, CSS can be troublesome. Developers sometimes need to integrate variables, selector inheritance, and mix-in to do more complex things within a stylesheet. Sass extends CSS so web developers can do just that.
Sass is a preprocessor scripting language that is compiled (or integrated) into a cascading stylesheet. Variables can be dynamically assigned, much like a scripting language like PHP, where variables are declared and manipulated in real-time.
In addition, Sass provides a number of integrations, including Ruby, Dart, PHP, Java, C++, and JavaScript. Sass is the most mature stable and powerful professional-grade CSS extension language:
- It is straightforward and easy to use front end tool to write any code
- Supports language extensions such as variables, nesting, and mixins
- Many useful functions for manipulating colors and other values
- Advanced features like control directives for libraries
- It offers well-formatted, customizable output
2. Javascript / AngularJS
HTML is very useful for declaring static documents. Nonetheless, there are issues when used for declaring dynamic views in web-applications. AngularJS lets you extend HTML vocabulary for your application. What results in is an extraordinarily expressive, readable, and quick to develop environment.
AngularJS is another essential tool for web developers. An enterprise-grade HTML extension, the Google-owned tool is free and open-source.
Angular is one of the best tools for web developers because it helps eliminate the tedium of coding and recoding repetitive tasks by standardizing certain functionalities in a stable library. In addition, there is no boilerplate code included. That means much of the boilerplate code is taken care of, sharply reducing development time.
Moreover, Angular provides dynamic data binding akin to a real-time database, extending the capabilities of HTML documents dramatically.
3. Webstorm
WebStorm helps developers to code more efficiently when working with large projects
It provides built-in tools for debugging, testing, and tracing client-side and Node.js applications. It integrates with popular command-line tools for web development.
Notably:
- Spy-js built-in tool allows tracing JavaScript code
- It provides a unified UI for working with many popular Version Control System
- It is extremely customizable to perfectly suit various coding style
- It offers built-in debugger for client-side code and Node.js apps
4. CodePen
By utilizing code snippets and allowing them to be tested at will, CodePen has made it fairly simple time create well-made web apps that run perfectly. Taste aside, any developer that uses CodePen immediately recognizes the power of the platform and is quick to use it in action. Most importantly, CodePen offers a suite of tools that makes writing CSS simple without limiting the effectiveness of the language.
CodePen also functions as a portfolio for freelance web developers.
CodePen also boasts a strong community that regularly empowers itself by sharing code snips and discussing them amongst themselves. The strong community that is present on the site has given rise to a monthly visitor count of over ten million.
The different views that CodePen provides are also astonishing because of how many features are included on top of one another. One of the features is the view mode which allows developers to view their code through a number of different lenses
CodePen also comes with a host of API features which all serve to guarantee a good project for all involved. Allowing links to build and demos to grow is part of how the ecosystem works for CodePen which uses its ease of use to make development a breeze. By utilizing APIs to their fullest, developers can make simple changes to complex code to get exactly the program they desire.
5. Docker
When you need to release web apps, services, and sites at scale, you’ll want to outsource most, if not all, of the server management. Directly managing instances manually for enterprise applications is untenable.
According to Amazon, Docker is a software platform that allows you to build, test, and deploy applications quickly. Docker packages software into standardized units called containers that have everything the software needs to run including libraries, system tools, code, and runtime.
Using Docker, you can quickly deploy and scale applications into any environment and know your code will run.
Running Docker on AWS provides developers and admins a highly reliable, low-cost way to build, ship, and run distributed applications at any scale. AWS supports both Docker licensing models: open source Docker Community Edition and subscription-based Docker Enterprise Edition.
Docker works by providing a standard way to run your code. Docker is an operating system for containers. Similar to how a virtual machine virtualizes (removes the need to directly manage) server hardware, containers virtualize the operating system of a server.
Docker is installed on each server and provides simple commands you can use to build, start, or stop containers.
6. GitHub
GitHub is completely free to use repository that allows developers across all disciplines to collaborate, communicate, and construct great apps. It serves as a great portfolio for developers and is an industry-standard for developers of every type and specialization. GitHub even offers job boards and advice blogs for developers who want to take their passions to the next level.
It allows for simple git management so that pushing and pulling versions of your project is a breeze. For modern web development, the complexity of features that GitHub provides is enough to keep developers ahead of the pack by allowing for deeper customization in a more concise package.
Of course, GitHub is ideal for managing source code and sharing edits with the community at large. Web developers can modify their source code on the fly and create detailed notes within the app that can be shared amongst the group members.
Additionally, collaboration is made simple in GitHub by allowing developers to port their code directly into forums and threads in which real developers will provide honest feedback on the quality and substance of the code. The ability to receive immediate and constant feedback on your projects is an incredible benefit that will keep your projects at the top of their game.
What other tools do you know or use? Try the above tools and let us know your opinion about them in the comments below!
Author bio:
Romy Toma-Catauta works in the marketing field and is passionate about writing on Swift developer hiring guides, business, interior design, and psychology.