In this series of essays, I'll be covering a set of tools developers cannot and should not live without.
Software development is an art that requires discipline, deep focus and a lot of trials and errors. Actually, the latter is probably the most important of all because developers run a lot of experiments before settling for a solution. To support a great number of experiments, developers need some special tools. The first one we will cover in this series is an IDE.
IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment.
An IDE in the real world
We all know Microsoft Word or Google Document; These two technologies represent IDEs in the real world. When writing a letter, using one of these tools will drastically accelerate the way you deliver your piece. They will help you with spellcheckers, words suggestions, the semantic meaning of the sentence, the formatting and much more.
Imagine writing a letter nowadays without these tools. You'll be much slower and not efficient at all.
Therefore, the choice of tools is critical. You cannot afford not to have the best one the market can offer.
An IDE in the tech world
In programming, when people write code with Java, JavaScript, C#, PHP or any programming language and framework, they use an IDE. The IDE helps with the following:
Code Suggestion and Code completion
Errors checker and code execution
Debugging errors faster
Code Testing
This list is not exhaustive. The number of features is 100 fold the one listed above.
List of (famous) IDEs
IntelliJ is the most popular IDEs in the Java world. You've probably heard of Eclipse.
Microsoft Visual Studio is the flagship IDE within the .NET environment
Visual Studio Code or VSCode in short is one of the most used IDEs for JavaScript-based projects. However, It is used with dozen other technologies. The only thing needed is a plugin
WebStorm is also quite popular in the web world
PHPStorm, just like the name mentioned, is for PHP-based projects.
XCode is the IDE to build apps in the Apple world (Swift or Objective-C)
Android Studio is for Android apps
This list is much longer than listed above.
Takeaways
A developer without an IDE is like a writer writing on a paper. IDEs are so obvious that they are often not mentioned in job descriptions or resumes. They're just part of the ecosystem.
A piece of advice I give to developers is to master their IDE! They only need to master one. That will save them hours per month.
This was Developers' inseparable toolkit: Part 1, IDE
If you found this useful, please share it in your community and share your feedback with me in the comments section.
Don't forget to take the weekly test to see how you stack up with your peers on the tech jargon.
Until next time, take care!