Joel Dorrington

A decision every budding developer must make before beginning the journey of education is to choose the tools and software they include in their development environment.

I chose to use the same tools and software as the instructors I learned from in order to limit confusion. If my software was doing something different to theirs, I’d know there was a problem.

The collection of developer tools I use:

Sublime Text

Sublime text is a great text editor. Their free trial is not time restricted and is perfect for beginners learning to code. I use it for any front-end work from HTML to Angular.

It has all the standard features such as syntax highlighting and tab completion. One of my favourite features is the ability to create shortcuts for your own snippets. For example, I created a HTML boiler plate snippet that included a link tag for bootstrap. Now when I type ‘bp’ and hit tab, my HTML document is set up, ready for me to start working on the body using bootstrap.

Cloud9

For more complex projects I use a cloud based IDE (integrated development environment) called Cloud9. They also have a free service perfect for development students. A great text editor is just the beginning of the features they offer.

In your project workspace, they provide you with a file manager and text editor, and a small piece of server space which you can use to test and serve your app using a command line terminal. It makes back-end development much less daunting.

IntelliJ IDEA

Another free service, the community version of IntelliJ IDEA is the tool I use for writing Python. It can be configured to integrate with your machine’s instance of Python, and there’s a huge variety of plug-ins to add useful features. A plug-in I find to be excellent is a SQLite visual database explorer. I forget the name of it at this time.

Google Chrome

No developer environment is complete without a browser. Maybe an obvious choice but I find Google Chrome to be a great asset. It supports all the latest HTML and CSS features, the developer tools panel is excellent and intuitive, and the plug-in range is amazing.

I’m curious to try Firefox as a developer tool but for now, Chrome is the work horse I depend on.