In order to work efficiently, collaboratively, and master a complete workflow from planning to shipping, it is important to make use of the great tools out there that help developers in the planning, design, development, testing and maintenance of the project. There are amazing tools out there that take care of your projects like mothers take care of their babies. Here are a few of them I’ve worked with.
GitHub is a great hosting service for git-repositories. I’ve used it for versioning and storing projects on the cloud, to be accessible anytime and from anywhere, and also to be able to collaborate smoothly with others. When working solo, I sometimes use git to version projects locally.
I fell for this tool with a butler logo called Jenkins, when I used it on a previous project to automate the building and deploying processes of our application. I wrote Batch script commands to control the flow, and sent build reports to my team members’ social media accounts in slack and via email.
Perforce is another tool I’m experienced with, using the p4v visual client to version and manage my code.
I came across Mocha a few years ago. It’s a unit test framework built on NodeJS and comes with many features and tricks ready to use. Basically you write code that tests your code, in order to capture bugs early on and minimise the risks of introducing new ones through updates.
When working on a tech project, what’s more important than programming it?
Planning what to program! Hansoft is a project management tool in which you can create and assign tasks, track their progress and plan the project development timeline. It’s one of my absolute favorites, it’s easy to use, and works great for both solo as well as collaborative projects.
Trello is another all-time favorite of mine – and perhaps yours! It’s one of those task management systems that you just can’t get enough of. Any project, tech or non-tech related, is usually planned here first. Tech projects, personal development efforts, market research strategies, and all kinds of todo-lists are conveniently created and sorted here in on a nice Kanban-style board.
Ever heard of this cutie? I had an issue with a previous JavaScript team project not being well documented, so I searched and found this jsdoc, a JS code documentation generator. Unleash it on your code base, and it will create a nice, organised and searchable website with all the documentation you have in the code. And if you’ve been a good programmer and tagged your comments – congratulations: you now have a professional website with API documentation, ready to go live. <3