When you are starting your web developer career, you have to focus on the following (or similar) things:
- HTML
- CSS
- JS/TS
- Git
- React
- Vue
- Sass/Less
- Bootstrap / Material UI / Ant Design
And the list is rising and rising every year. Job seekers try to study more and more. Then you start searching for your first company. You absolutely know it’s not easy. And then there is your first job offer and the first day in your company. You are happy, and there is onboarding. You are trying to learn more: Jira, Agile, team code styles, team rules, BAs, PMs, QAs, and etc. Finally, you start writing your code and fixing bugs.
In all these things, I have absolutely forgotten about one important skill — how to fix bugs better and more efficiently using Dev Tools. Honestly, I am not sure that I really knew much about Dev Tools, because modern frontend courses often don’t include a Dev Tools section or include only a very limited part. As a result, juniors don’t understand how helpful Dev Tools can be.
Today I would like to talk about how often Dev Tools are pushed to the second or even third place when a junior starts working. But this is not a guide like “How to use Dev Tools” or something like that.
During the first couple of months at my job, I used Dev Tools only to look at styles in the Elements tab and the Network tab to check request errors. That’s all. I was lost among the tabs and didn’t know what all those values meant… And it didn’t feel required for a junior. My attention was focused on other parts of the job, and I completely lost focus on my efficiency. I ignored Dev Tools for a long time: I tried to debug using console.log instead of breakpoints, and I tried to write more code instead of analyzing already written code in Dev Tools. Just tell me that I was not alone…
Then I started to understand how powerful Dev Tools really are:
- Use Breakpoints and inspect variables live
- Measure rendering and scripting performance in real time
- Detect UI freezes and long tasks
- Analyze unnecessary re-renders
- Inspect framework component trees, props, and state
- Simulate slow networks, weak devices, or even offline mode
- Audit accessibility issues
- Use Lighthouse to analyze performance and SEO
- Use the Memory tab to inspect localStorage, sessionStorage, cookies, and IndexedDB
- Debug production bugs that don’t reproduce in development mode
Dev Tools are like your car dashboard. If you know exactly where to look, you can find the reason for almost any problem. But modern Dev Tools are much more crowded compared to a car dashboard. It feels like a car is bigger and more massive than modern websites, yet Dev Tools contain far more information than a car’s dashboard.
So Dev Tools are often the real difference between a junior developer and a middle or senior one. You can keep working with console.log or asking AI to debug the code using those logs — and sometimes that will work. But if you truly want to grow, to understand what’s happening instead of guessing, you need something more powerful. You need to see, measure, pause, and analyze.
That’s where Dev Tools stop being optional and start becoming your habit.
And if you want to become a master, this is one of those skills you simply can’t ignore.
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