As you may have seen, Fifteen are currently hiring for two brand new developers, and in the spirit of web development, I thought that I’d write a list of the tools and technologies which the developers here at Fifteen use here in our day-to-day lives.
Don’t worry if these all sound like a bunch of acronyms, a lot of Web Development Toolkits have quite long-winded names, so we like to shorten them. Additionally, these are not in any particular order.
NPM
This stands for Node Package Manager, and it’s something we’ve recently started using to automate some of the tasks we kept repeating, such as compiling our SCSS. Within NPM there’s a package called gulp which we can run in the background and it does things like compile our SCSS into CSS and reload our page automatically every time we make a change. Really useful!
SCSS
So, you may have seen me mention SCSS (or Sass) earlier. This is short for Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets, which basically means we can write our CSS faster and more efficiently, directly impacting the load speed of a website. Without getting too technical, it really does impact the way we work in a huge way.
Git
We use Git as our Version Control System, which means that every time we make a change, we can keep track of those changes within our Git Repositories. This is great because it means that (on the rare occasion) that we make a mistake, it’s easy to undo, as we have the previous version right there at our fingertips.
CSS3, HTML5, jQuery
While these are three items, not one, I’ve rolled them into one. We use these every day, on every single website we produce. CSS is short for Cascading Stylesheets, HTML is short for Hyper Text Markup Language, and jQuery is a library that runs on top of Javascript to provide easier access to several functions. Without these three, the web would be a very different, more empty place.
Sublime Text 3, PHPStorm, Zend Studio
Basically, a good IDE – which stands for Integrated Development Environment – is essential. These applications are where the developers write the bulk of your website. Not within the CMS, within an IDE. Your PHP is written here, as is your HTML, CSS and Javascript. The IDE will highlight any errors you make and a good one will include a debugger, so you do not have to keep re-loading the site to test your code works.
Google & Stack Overflow
Even the best developer sometimes gets stuck. In fact, the very nature of Web Development is figuring out the best and most efficient way to solve a problem. As such, it’s often helpful to use Google to check if what you want to do is even possible, or if you have, in fact, broken the Internet.
Stack Overflow is a website which is dedicated specifically to Questions and Answers. One aspect of that site is dedicated to Programming Questions & Answers. If you have a question about HTML, CSS, PHP or jQuery, the chances are that it’s been answered multiple times on Stack Overflow.
That about wraps up what we use most on a daily basis. If I were to list everything we used throughout the day, this blog entry would be a lot longer! Hopefully you’ve learned something about Web Development, and if you are looking to start a career in web development, why not give us a call!