Practicing Developer
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What software development tools (libraries/frameworks/apps/whatever) make you feel relaxed while you're working with them?
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Top comments (23)
I feel very relaxed when doing TDD with Rails/rspec. If I'm settled enough to be doing TDD in the first place (which is hard for me if I'm not sure where I'm going), it's a really cathartic experience.
That flow feeling when you get into the groove of running tests and adding code is great. For me, I especially feel good when TDD'ing my way through API endpoints on a Rails project.
Same. Rails/Rspec is the only time I love TDD, with javascript I usually do a more behavior driven testing approach because I feel like it's so much easier to end up with false positives/negatives
For me, in recent months, it's been Vue.js.
Although once in a while I get stuck on something, for the most part the tools in that ecosystem feel like they're written by thoughtful developers who care about not frustrating you or confusing you with their choices.
What about you?
JetBrains products make things really easy. Material Theme plugin helps with the look and feel. VSCode is nice as well. I use JetBrains for Java and Python, and then VSCode for anything else.
I've had memory leaks with the Material Theme add-on so I had to uninstall it at work :(
That sucks. I'll keep an eye on it,and may have to get rid of it. I have had some issues while it was open for a while in multiple instances and lots of other things, but I didn't have a clue as to what the cause was.
In my case (FullStack Development) I use a lot, this tools/software:
NPM
Webpack
AngularJS
Angular Cli
VSCode
Sublime Text
Chrome / Firefox
Bitwarden (passwords manager)
clickup (project management)
TimenEye (tracking time)
Workona (switch spaces in chrome)
Docker
Kubernetes
Slack
Telegram
The command line.
.NET core and uwp have been AMAZING. Visual Studio is quite possibly the most powerful debugging tool in the world, and building uwp apps with it is AMAZING. Building UWP apps is like driving a Tesla. Or like, taking a hot knife through butter. It's so smooth. It's so simple. It does a lot of heavy lifting for you so all you have to do is transfer your creativity from your your mind to your computer. It's honestly such a fun experience. No dependency hell, no jumping between terminal to web to code editor. No npm. No webpack. No metro server. You just press run and the framework sings. It's beautiful 😍
And I've worked with react, react Native, typescript, vim, Python, and so many other languages and frameworks. Uwp takes the cake for most relaxing to use.
I think the tools that helped me relax most recently have been linters, code-formatters, and tests. Being able to trust tooling & tests to fix the formatting of my code and detect silly mistakes makes for a much more pleasant experience.
As for the code itself, both the attrs and typing libraries in Python are things I can't do without now. They make the code much cleaner and more understandable.
Elm: the mix of functional, strong compiler and the fact that it forces you to handle cases where things go wrong directly is relaxing. You don't have to worry when refactoring the compiler is here for you
I love working with Laravel. I made a career switch around 3 or 4 years ago from factory work to development.
First job I got was mostly plain php. I remember that we build systems from scratch and needed to make everything over and over again.
In my spare time I looked at frameworks and I started with codeigniter but ellislab dropped support and it wasn't clear what future it would have.
When I started with Laravel the 4.2 version was just released and I liked using it since the learning curve wasn't too high. I remain using laravel to this day and have seen most of the ups and downs.
It really gives me joy that I can help my team on a framework level. Meaning I have seen almost all changes that happend and are happinging in the framework which I can explain to my team.
Sometimes I can make educated guesses based on the past which sometimes help me and my team to be ready for new releases.
Notepad++
It is the one tool which I can use easily and whenever I need to make small changes. It's so much better than any of the IDEs for this reason.
Of course, I miss all the features an IDE provides at that time. But it makes me feel relaxed. 🙂