Since moving on from Thought Den to become a freelance coder, Digital apprenticeship teacher and a new company director, there’s some great tools that have been keep me steaming along at the Coal Face.
Here’s the tech which keeps my coding efficient,
Source Tree (git GUI)
Keeps me making lots of small and useful GIT commits. Makes merging simple and watching the progress clear. Source Tree
NodeJS
This little beauty with its “npm” package manager ties all of my favourite tools together. I’m only just learning to use its Javascript server capabilities with some middleware express and mongoose. NodeJs
Grunt-CLI
This is the ultimate, you can create site build commands and tie up a whole host of useful tools. Grunt
Grunt Spritesmith
Really fast node package for putting together your spritesheets Grunt Spritesmith
SASS
A pre-processor to output CSS which makes writing your stylesheets “nearly” fun! SASS
Twitter Bootstrap 3
How to make a site or app look good REALLY quickly and handle all the media queries without too much thought. Using this package keeps your HTML5 all similar and your CSS / SASS constent. However, instead of div tag soup you are likely to end up with class soup. Twitter bootstrap
DalekJS
For End to End (e2e) testing that doesn’t suck like Selenium WedDriver. It’s still a little flaky, but you can write it in Javascript and they’re easy to start. Dalek JS
Karma and Jasmine
Brilliant for unit testing all your code. Karma Jasmine
KnockoutJs and AngularJS
These two are my favourite Javascript frameworks. KnockoutJs for its simplicity and no need for crazy site structures. AngularJS, only just a fav, I’ve been doing a lot of Backbone Marionette recently and it’s not too bad… KnockoutJs AngularJS
Github
Where I’ve been hosting my guy repos most recently, just becuase it’s got more cool stats porn and a better community than bitbucket Github
Divvy
A great little mac app which helps divide up your working space between console logs, terminal and sublime Divvy
Sublime 2
The best text editor I’ve found Sublime 2
Terminal
Can’t help it adding it to the list, it’s not Kool Aid really, but my linux “foo” is getting steadily better. Easy on the `sudo` and speedy on the `git deploy`
Dan Course - Product Manager 