For many years a persistent legend has existed, of the web developer who writes their code in Notepad, from scratch. As a young person interested in the internet, I found myself proudly displaying a now embarrassing “Proudly Made in Notepad” badge on my personal home page. With the years of experience in between, my toolkit has evolved continuously and could be considered unrecognizable from a mere 6 months ago. Today I would like to share some of the tools I use during my day to day work at Web Services.
Visual Studio Code – I was very surprised to find myself adopting the lightweight integrated development environment (IDE), released by Microsoft in 2015. Innumerable extensions make the product as full-featured as its monolithic cousin, Visual Studio Enterprise, while retaining the speed that comes with a smaller package. For those that prefer command-line tools, the built in terminal window allows a user to conveniently compile and execute their projects, without having to switch to another application.
Local by Flywheel – A docker based WordPress development platform that makes creating local development websites a seconds long process; I have truly fallen in love with this product. We use Local to build templates and plugins for our various WordPress sites, and use composer to facilitate collaboration between developers.
WordPress – The vast majority of the work we do in Web Services is in service of public-facing websites — and WordPress is our CMS of choice. Being one of the most mature platforms on the market, we count on WordPress for familiarity of use, stability, and availability of options.
Laravel & Lumen – When more complex requirements come our way we need to consider more powerful options. Laravel & Lumen are the tools we use to build web applications that make heavier use of business logic than traditional public-facing websites
Composer & NPM – Modern web development makes use of a multitude of different packages that solve common problems for developers. Rather than having to write thousands of lines of code by hand we opt to make use of open source libraries installed using package management tools. Composer and NPM serve similar roles in the PHP and Javascript worlds.
Slack – This is the primary internal communication tool our team uses, however we are investigating alternative options at the moment. Slack is a web based live chat and collaboration platform, with clients on all major platforms. The ease of use and search ability have made it our platform of choice.
Refactoring to Collections by Adam Wathan – This is not so much a tool as it is a tremendously helpful course. I was fortunate enough to be taught this course by Adam in person at the True North PHP conference; Collections allow developers using Laravel to never write a loop again!
A developer’s toolkit is very similar to Batman’s utility belt, it can help us out of almost any situation, and is constantly evolving with new technologies and techniques.
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