So the idea of this read me file is to hopefully share some of the things I use or do when I develop websites. I would like to stress I am nowhere near being a professional developer or someone who is a qualified educator. However, as someone who does this as a hobby and is mostly self-taught through free resources on the internet, I just want to share something with the community. If you take away something new from this then good or if not then I appreciate your time to read this.
So there really isn't much to my background when it comes to developing. When I was 13 back in 2009 I wanted to be a YouTuber, so I set out and made many many many videos which as you can imagine where very poor quality. However one particular video type I loved to make was "how to" videos. I would research, lookup and learn something just to then pass the information and knowledge on. One very brief series was how to make a very crude website. Fast forward the years and unfortunately the school I attended only offered the subject "computing" at A levels. When I studied and not through lack of trying I got an E, exams are not my strong suit but I would happily spend hours on end working on coursework. My job now is working in the automotive trade but I do love to dabble with front end development.
So there are a number of pieces of software out there but I am going to give almost like mini-reviews of what I have used in the past and you can decide what sounds right for you!
- Notepad++ was my first goto editor as it's free. Who doesn't like that! Plus it is simple to use and does what it says on the tin. The best phrase to sum this up is "Ol' Reliable".
- Atom was my first transition to trying out an IDE solution. Why did I pick Atom? It was free of course but also it looked like it had a nice clean GUI and alot of customisation with hundreds of add-ons and themes. However I can't explain it. I just didn't enjoy using this software so it didn't stay installed for very long on my computer. (At the time of writing this, I just found out that Atom is being shut down.)
- Sublime Text After going from Notepad++ to Atom then back to Notepad++. I eventually thought I'd give another code editor a try and I ended up picking Sublime Text. The reason I went with this is because Sublime also offered Sublime Merge which is a Git client which I wanted to give a chance since I mainly use GitHub Desktop but thats for a later section. I loved the look, the feel of the editor and did everything I needed it to do. The reason which bugged me is that it started pestering me to buy a license everytime I launched the application. I am all for supporting developers and their work etc but because my use case for this software is for a hobby and I don't get any compensation for my random creations I couldn't justify spending money on the licence, especially since there are free solutions out there. So with that I moved away from Sublime Text. I would like to note don't let the licence aspect push you away from this software. It's a solid bit of kit to add to your arsenal.
- Visual Studio Code is currently my actively used code editor, it just works and it's free. With tons of extensions with support for everything but the kitchen sink it hasn't let me down. I even love the fact there is an online editor in case you're away from your machine or can't install software on a work machine but you want to inspect some code you can just use https://vscode.dev/.