You will agree that frontend development tools are constantly on the rise, with new frontend developer tools springing forth almost every day.
It becomes challenging for frontend developers to choose the right frontend tools for the job, whereas knowing the right tool for the task.
As a professional software engineer working with the Frontend stacks for a couple of years, I have experience with varieties of frontend developer tools.
I have a list of favorites frontend developer tools that I work with daily to speed up my frontend development workflow.
This post will share an exquisite list of top frontend developer tools that I had personally used in 2021 and what I love about them, which you will find helpful to speed up your frontend development workflow.
These tools are my favorite tools and might not be very popular, but they are unique in their different use cases and helpful in my frontend development workflow.
If you’re ready to see the awesomeness in each of these frontend developer tools, let’s get right into it.
Visual Studio Code(vscode)
When choosing code editors, I always allow the developer to take charge of the decision-making because different developers love different settings and preferences and, of course, other code editors.
However, visual studio code has proven to be the most popular code editor among developers because of its simplicity and how easy it is to customize and configure visual studio code to best fit your development workflow by installing extensions.
Suppose you’re looking for an open-source, cross-platform, and easily customizable code editor to speed up your frontend development workflow.
In that case, I will highly recommend visual studio code because you can easily customize your theme, install thousands of extensions to solve specific frontend problems to make your development smooth.
Vscode is a free and open-source project that has an integrated terminal, debugger, problem list, console output inspector, and the navigator sidebar is very simple and powerful.
With it, you can manage your files and folder with ease. It also has the search widget has a powerful auto-complete feature to search and find your files.
In vscode, there are many extensions available for the majority of the languages supported, such as JavaScript, Java, PHP, etc., including syntax highlighters, IntelliSense, code completion, and debuggers.
There is also an extension to manage application configuration and architecture like Docker and Jenkins.
I highly recommend you download and try out Visual Studio Code.
Chrome Developer Tools
Chrome Developer tool doesn’t sound like a regular frontend developer tool but trusts me, you will find this very helpful, and it will help you a lot of the time to debug and inspect your frontend projects.
It is one of my hacks to developing my frontend project faster because it affords me to debug my CSS, HTML, and JavaScript on the go.
It helps you inspect pages and their components quickly without having to go to the IDE back and forth and speed up your frontend development workflow.
If you master your chrome developer tools, you can edit your CSS and HTML in real-time or debug your JavaScript, all while viewing a thorough performance analysis of your website?
Chrome developer tool allows developers access to the internals of their web application.
In addition, the Network tools can help optimize your loading flows. At the same time, the Timeline gives you a deeper understanding of what the browser is doing at any given moment.
You can learn many helpful productivity hacks by mastering how you use your chrome developer tool effectively.
Sass
CSS Preprocessors are frontend developer tool that helps you write maintainable and future-proof code while reducing the time spent writing and rewriting CSS styles following the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) engineering principle.
Sass is the best CSS preprocessor and the best way to extend CSS. It has been active in development and support for the past 3 years.
Though there are other CSS preprocessors out there, SASS happens to be my favorite because of its simplicity and the ability for complete beginners to get up and running even without prior knowledge.
Sass uses variables, mixins, and nesting, inheritance, and all with a CSS-compatible syntax to be rendered to plain CSS during the compilation process, making your stylesheets more readable and DRY.
This method of writing CSS is obliging when you want to reduce repetition and make your massive stylesheets more organized.
Sass is like programming your CSS. To get started, I will recommend looking up this beginner’s guide to Sass.
Git and Github
First off, this is the most vital frontend developer tool you should learn, as the knowledge of version control systems is an essential skill for any software engineer, both frontend and backend.
Whether you’re working as a freelancer or in a team, you need a way to track changes you have made to the codebase over time.
Trust me, at some point, and you’ll need to check or even revert to an earlier version of your codebase!
Many version control systems are available to choose from, and organizations can develop private control systems internally.
Still, Git and Github happen to be the most popular distributed version control system and code repository, respectively.
Git is the most popular, and it’s integrated into almost all code editors right out of the box and works very with the most popular code repository; Github.
I started using Git and Github in 2015, and since then, I haven’t written a single code without initializing Git.
It is because I love how simple it is to get started with a lifesaver as Git; pushing it to the most popular code repository Github is only a few commands away.
Also, it allows me to get back in time to fix bugs and revert code to previous commits.
GitHub Ultimate: Master Git and GitHub — Beginner to Expert is undoubtedly the best course to learn and master Git and Github all in one place.
To learn Git and Github, the beginner’s guide to Git & Github is all you need to get up and running.
Vue.js
Vue.js is my favorite frontend developer tool, and I use it in all my side projects.
According to Evan You, the creator of Vue.js — “Vue.js is a more flexible, less opinionated solution. It’s only an interface layer so you can use it as a light feature in pages instead of a full-blown SPA”.
To get started, Vue JS is one of the most straightforward frameworks out there for most developers to jump into, as Evan You made this framework out of JavaScript.
Therefore, anyone that has basic JavaScript knowledge will be able to develop with VueJS.
I started using Vue.js immediately after working on a project built with Laravel and Vue.js combined.
After reading a few documentation, I was already familiar with the codebase and its structure because the structure of Vue.js is the same as in a traditional web development method of separating HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in an external file.
Vue.js is my favorite frontend framework and here is why, and I will highly recommend it to you to get started building your next frontend project with it.
Vue — The Complete Guide (w/ Router, Vuex, Composition API) is the best course to learn the new Vue 3 and master the composition API with numerous projects to get you started.
The best place to learn Vue.js is to start from the official documentation. It is so easy to learn and master Vue.js just by reading the official documentation.
TypeScript
TypeScript is JavaScript with Types and has gained significant adoption and top 2 most loved language according to StackOverflow’s 2020 Developer Survey.
Whether TypeScript is just JavaScript with Types or another programming language to learn.
Still, TypeScript is a handy frontend developer tool that can save you time debugging variable type-checking errors and type safety checks.
Developers are prone to making variable type-checking and type safety errors.
Therefore, many frameworks are migrating and supporting TypeScript right out of the box to avoid these errors in production, so it is the future of frontend development, and I highly recommend that you learn TypeScript.
Typescript: The Complete Developer’s Guide[2020] is my all-time TypeScript best course. With it, you will master Typescript by learning popular design patterns and building complex projects. Includes React and Express!
Retool
The Retool is a frontend development tool that I have discovered lately. Retool is a low-code platform for the rapid development of internal tools.
Any tool developed and used by the organization internally, whether in the same or different departments, is considered an Internal tool.
Developing and maintaining internal tools can cost a lot of time, effort, and money to the organization, and hence the Retool was developed.
Aside from the organizational level cost, it will cost developers more work thinking through the UI/UX design, building a login flow, tables, styling, making HTTP requests, and other redundant tasks.
This back and forth process could take weeks, if not months, to craft out usable software.
To save yourself and your company this cost and stress.
You can use this Retool to build out your internal tools by dragging and dropping the UI components you need, connecting your database, and writing only the queries you need to interact with your data.
Learning Retool is very simple to get started as it’s just dragging and dropping components. You can learn how to use Retool to build a simple internal app in minutes.
Tailwind CSS
With a tailwind CSS frontend developer tool, you can build your modern website without ever leaving your HTML.
It is a utility-first CSS framework packed with classes that can be composed to create any design directly in your markup and components.
With tailwind CSS, you worry less about writing custom CSS or even having a CSS file.
You can explore the use cases of tailwind CSS more when using component-based architecture and building individual components without the need to write any external CSS or open any style tags.
Tailwind CSS also surpasses other CSS frameworks because you’re not limited to only a pre-styled component that makes your project similar in design.
However, it provides low-level utility classes for styling virtually every CSS property making your pages as unique as you can imagine.
To get started with Tailwind CSS for your project, I recommend this article to startlearning Tailwind CSS.
Tailwind CSS: The Complete Guide ( Project Included ) is a complete course to learn and master Tailwind CSS with project examples included.
Conclusion
This article introduced you to different frontend developer tools that help speed up my frontend development workflow.
These frontend developer tools will supercharge your productivity, improve your frontend development workflow and help you build frontend applications faster.
I have not listed many great frontend developer tools and will love to hear from you; which frontend developer tool improves your productivity and helps you build app faster.
Would you please share them in the comment section?
Originally published at https://masteringbackend.com on August 17, 2021.
Top comments (1)
Nice write-up Solomon. Thanks for sharing