13, Joseph Str., Opebi,Lagos Nigeria

7 Useful Tools Developers Need To Get Familiar With

OGHENEARE OCHUKO | 05-29-2024

7 Useful Tools Developers Need To Get Familiar With


It is important to stay on track with the fast moving and ever changing world of software development. There are many options when it comes to deciding on which software development tools to use for your daily tasks at work, and to build working software efficiently, you need the best software development tools around as they’ll make your life a lot easier!

Software development industry has been constantly changing to keep pace with the demand of products. To do that new languages, frameworks, libraries, and tools are released almost daily, some of them gain maturity and popularity between developers.

As a developer you will write, test, deploy, and document code, communicate with your team, and follow up the progress of the project. For each one of those mentioned processes there are tons of tools created and deployed in the market. However, we made the effort of selecting the 7 most popular ones. The ones that are widely used by professional software development teams and the ones we use at Devnaija Academy when we train our students to become a professional developer.

 

GitHub

The world’s leading software development platform. GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service. In simple words, it is like a Google Drive for software projects, where you can find code. When uploading your project, you have the choice of making it public or private. The community is huge and the project base even bigger. GitHub is also an excellent place for collaborative development, where developers can discover, share, and build better software.

Your code needs to be stored, tested, compiled, packaged and deployed in order to be available for your customers, this is a repetitive task and should be automated to save you time and reduce human error. Github repositories and actions allows you to configure a set of tasks that will be executed once you commit or merge code to a branch.

 

Git

Git is a Version Control System (VCS) that allows you to save your work and go back and forward easily and securely. Also, two or more developers could work on the same project/file simultaneously. Git is the most used and widely adopted VCS.

Git is a free and open source distributed VCS designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. When a developer is working on something, they have to regularly make changes to the code until they get to the last version. What a version control system does is that it saves every change made, allowing others to collaborate, make changes and contribute. You will also find a copy of the code of every developer’s work.

 

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is one of software developers' most popular code editors. It is commonly referred to as VS Code. It is available for all major operating systems due to many experienced as well as beginner software developers using this software development platform.

 

Slack

Code is written in a community of developers, almost nobody will create a productive and robust app for the market by itself. Development teams that follow agile methodology will be 10 people tops, it shouldn’t be an issue to communicate between the team, nevertheless there are plenty of tools to communicate that sometimes produce the opposite effect.

Slack is where work flows. It’s where the people you need, the information you share, and the tools you use come together to get things done. Slack is an amazing app that developers use for communication. Slack really helps to reduce the amount of daily emails, plus it increased communication between different teams. In Slack we create different channels and always have a common one, where we share company news, jokes, etc. I would say it has united us even more! Also, it helps you to stay focused as each channel has its own topic; you always know where to find information and where to ask a question regarding a particular topic and instantly receive an answer. Also, you have a chat option which you can use to speak directly with each member of the team in real time, between channels . If this wasn’t enough, there is also a drag and drop that’s really nice to use, a feature that enables you to share all sorts of files and add comments to them, or even tag people. Highly recommended!

 

Chrome DevTools

Chrome DevTools is meant for web developers to write web applications, web services, and testing. Various debugging tools are built right into the Google Chrome browser to facilitate web development. Chrome DevTools is one of the best software development tools for website developers, as it comes right from Google.

You can test out CSS on your website pages, debug Javascript in the browser, and evaluate how well your application performs on the front end, thanks to DevTools. With Chrome DevTools, you can easily study and modify the DOM, evaluate a website's resources, load, and efficiency, account for the page's memory consumption, and much more. Anyone working in the online industry needs to have access to this technology. One of the most important aspects of Google DevTools is that they are available for free through the Chrome browser.

 

Postman

Once a developer starts creating or consuming APIs you need a tool to execute your HTTP requests and interact with the backend quickly and without major implementations. Postman allows you to build, test, debug, document, monitor, and publish your APIs in a simple and clean way. Our students at Devnaija learn to use Postman while developing their own APIs.

 

Stack Overflow

And last but not least, we want to mention Stack Overflow. It may not be a tool in the same sense of the above mentioned but it is the largest online community for programmers, which is visited by more than 50 million developers every month. This is a place where they learn, share knowledge, and advance their careers. Our developers love this forum and visit it almost every day as you can find answer to almost all the questions and doubts you may have.

 

Conclusion

This post analyzes the best software development tools you can use to create and deploy apps in 2023 and beyond. Different types of software development tools are discussed to help you in different aspects of creating an app. Ultimately, it all comes down to choosing the best tools for your business. You can also enroll @ Devnaija Academy to kickstart your coding career Click on this link to know more about our courses devnaija.com. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us – we're always happy to help. Happy coding!