Dev Toolbox: Front-End Edition

[BlytheE]

Our final dive into a Dev Toolbox is for front-end developers. Shout out to Erik Burton (@ErikB) for contributing to this post! I have also included responses from an anonymous developer (aka Totally Awesome Dev).

What is your favorite code editor? Do you use any keyboard shortcuts that make your job easier?

• EB: VS Code. CTRL + SHIFT + K (delete line) all the time. I’m also a big fan of the Git Lens extension and it has many useful shortcuts.
• Totally Awesome Dev: I’ve used emacs with spacemacs bundle for everything that’s not .NET for years. It’s a purely keyboard driven editor so I never have to reach for my mouse when working in it. I love the easy tiling built in to let me have multiple files and terminals all open how I want easily.

Preferred testing framework?

• EB: Jest is pretty good these days. I like Mocha/Chai as well. Enzyme is about as good as it gets for unit testing React.
• Totally Awesome Dev: All of them. I don’t have any preference for a testing framework, just a strong preference for writing tests given whichever tooling is available for it.

Helpful learning resources?

• EB: Egghead.io is my go-to. Mostly I just follow RSS feeds to stay in the loop and search for talks or write-ups on specific subject matter that I’m interested in, where ever it may live.
• Totally Awesome Dev: 

  Programming in the twenty-first century

  Steve Yegge’s old and new blog

  Researching questions to write answers at Software Engineering StackExchange

Useful or fun libraries? Any open-source projects you'd like to give a shout out to?

• EB: RoughJS is super cool. Also Parcel. Babel 7 is a great evolution and has pretty robust transpilation built in, sidestepping the need for Webpack in some/(many?) cases.
• Totally Awesome Dev: I’ve always found restlet client to be a great tool for anyone who needs to do much with rest APIs, not well known enough.

Anything else you think a developer needs to know?

• EB: Don’t be so hard on yourself. Everyone feels like they don’t know what they are doing sometimes. Some are just better at faking it than others. 😃
• Totally Awesome Dev: The history of software design theory in and outside of industry is littered with lessons. Look backwards for trail markers of what has gone well and what hasn’t. You’re likely to find more problems and solutions repeated from decades past than you’ll know, so there’s great value studying the paths that got us here.

And that concludes the Dev Toolbox series! Comment below if you'd like to see another language's toolbox.