Discussion: How do you approach building websites or apps?

Hey, fellow DEVs,

I'm curious 🤔 about our processes when starting a new project/challenge.🌟
Whether you have years of experience or are new to the field, I'm sure you have valuable insights to offer.💡✨

Do you start by creating a plan on paper or move straight to code?📝💻

What is your approach to development when you already have a design?🎨

What are your favourite tools or technologies in your development workflow? 🛠️

Let's talk about it in the comments below!💬😊

Comments

[tq-bit]

For small projects, I usually start fiddling around and patch stuff together.

For small to medium customer projects, there's usually

• a functional specification (what the customer wants) [Obsidian]
• a 4C-diagram (what the customer needs) [Excalidraw]
• some wireframes, sometimes low fidelity prototypes (what the customer sees) [Penpot]
• a task list and brief user stories (what the customer does & what we talk about) [Github / Obsidian]
• source control, sometimes CI/CD (what the customer thinks is magic) [Github / Github Actions / Gitlab runners / Azure DevOps / Azure Webapp CI/CD]

For bigger ones:

• Organisation & time tracking (Super Productivity + Jira + all the stuff PMs love)
• all the other stuff you need for communication, updates, meetings, ...

Sometimes I even write docs, if it's scoped in the budget :)

[Jenna]

Hi tq-bit,

Thank you for sharing your process and the tools you use! 🛠️

Seeing how you approach projects of different sizes and the tools you use for each stage is insightful. 🌟

Yes, writing docs can help in the long run 📄, but I bet most of us might not like writing technical docs. 😅

[SalladShooter | Owner of phyal]

For creating a website, I usually start by throwing some simple code together and possibly using AI (ChatGPT) to upscale quickly to get an idea. But if it is a larger project I will plan with tasks or draw it out on paper to get an idea of layout (I should probably do this more often). I like to use CodePen and Replit to develop quickly and GitHub to keep track of tasks.

[Jenna]

Hi SalladShooter,

Thank you for sharing your process and the tools you use! 🛠️

Yes, it is best to have a plan before jumping to code. 😊📝
It helps save time while coding, as you know what direction you should be going already.

Nowadays AI helps to speed up development. 🤖