In the life of a developer, not everything is programming. Our colleague Jose Luis, an expert in fullstack web development, shares his allies in the battle against (or with) code.
- Technical fullstack development tools
- Non-technical tools to help a fullstack developer
We all have in our daily life a series of essential tools to work with, the typical ones that open automatically when we turn on the computer at the beginning of the day.
In this article I will try to summarize and organize what are these tools that I rely on every day to make my work in fullstack development easier, faster and of higher quality.
Fullstack development tools
When I say that they are technical tools, I mean that they are closely related to software development.
Visual Studio Code
As for code editors there are also many options but VS Code personally seems to me one of the best. A powerful code editor but extendable through thousands of plugins that you can find in its repository.
Clear and simple interface, good performance and support for all major operating systems and even has a web version.
It has a complex code auto-completion, debugger and native support for git and other version control services. And if all of this is not enough, it’s based on open source and has a large community behind it.
If you need an alternative with a simpler interface I recommend Sublime Text.
Postman
It doesn’t matter if you’re more frontend or backend oriented. In any house there will come a time when you work with an API, either creating it or consuming it.
Nothing better than Postman to create, test and document your API in a complete and easy way. It allows you to create workspaces, endpoint collections, execute HTTP requests with all kinds of advanced configuration and even document them in an automated way.
Again, it is an open source tool, dispelling the myth that open source software tends to be of lower quality.
Another very similar and also open source tool you should take a look at is Insomnia.
GitLab
Again a tool oriented to the developer in general, regardless of your focus.
From the beginning of your professional career you will need a version control tool, you will use it every day and it will become part of your routine without even realizing it.
Out of all the options on the market I have chosen GitLab for its ease of use, extensive free plan and open source.
Gitlab not only stores your code, it also offers free private repositories, project statistics, CI/CD, vulnerability monitoring and much more.
Very similar and with a quite extensive free plan, you may be interested in Bitbucket.
DBeaver
Another basic of the day to day of a programmer is a database manager. Here as always we have plenty of options, mainly depending on whether we need to manage a relational or non-relational database.
In this case I want to talk about DBeaver, a relational database manager. The advantages are the same I always try to look for. A complete software, that allows full database management, data import and export, works on any platform, is easy to use and of course free.
Non-technical tools that help a fullstack developer
These tools are just as essential, but are more focused on helping you get organized and resolve doubts.
ClickUp
ClickUp is a tool for organization, project management and document creation among many other things.
There are many project management tools but I know few like this one. It has a quite extensive free plan, it is easy to use and very complete. At Joppy we have been using it for a long time and we organize ourselves perfectly.
StackOverflow
Last but not least I wanted to mention StackOverflow. A tool that the vast majority of developers use constantly but many are ashamed to admit it.
In the same way that a doctor consults his Vademecum, it is logical that we software developers consult StackOverflow.
It is important anyway to use it correctly, to check if an answer is reliable by positive votes, to contrast the information we find and adapt it to our specific case.
People usually think that we dedicate ourselves to do ctrl+C ctrl+V with what we find in this forum but nothing further from the truth.
Conclusion
There will always be more tools that you can use, the options are endless: those that measure the user experience, style sheet management, some niche web application that only you control…
In short, I recommend that you always look for tools that suit you and your type of work, that are maintained by the community and receive frequent updates, that are easy to use, customizable and if possible free and open source.
It seems difficult to find but as you have just read there are very good options on the market.
