Five Must-Have Tools for Developers in 2019

Developers are a talented, hard-working bunch that are often seen as miracle workers by their clients. But you need more than a handful of certs and a good wifi connection to be an effective web developer — you need a suite of tools at your disposal to support your seemingly miraculous coding capabilities. Whether they contribute directly to the coding process, provide quality-of-life upgrades to your working environment, or something else altogether, here are five must-have tools for developers gearing up to work in 2019.

A Project Management App

Whether it’s Asana, Basecamp, or even just your own Slack channel, you need to be able to communicate with colleagues and clients as you work on a project. The best way to keep communications organized is through the use of a separate project management app, though, as this will make it easier to track conversations, post and review progress reports, or even seek second opinions on project components that you might like some feedback on.

A Solid VPN

Ask any web developer what you can use a virtual private network (VPN) for and they’re likely to give you the cheeky answer of “watching Netflix from anywhere in the world”. While that’s true, a good VPN is an excellent tool for more than just relaxing after coding all day. Using a VPN helps provide additional layers of security for your web clients. This is especially important for clients in the entertainment industry for example, considering how many major movie studios have suffered from high-profile hacks over the last few years.

Visual Testing Tools

Everyone’s got their favorite screen resolution. Everyone’s also got their favorite browser. But just because you like using Opera on your 4k monitor doesn’t mean that whatever project you’re coding for should be optimized for that. You need to keep in mind that whatever project you’re working on will have to look good across a number of browsers and resolutions, most of which are likely to be ones that you don’t enjoy working on or with. This necessitates using a visual testing tool like BrowserShots, as it shows you how your project will look in a number of different environments, without having to actually set your monitor back to 1080p or — ugh — load up Microsoft Edge.

Debugging Tools

Nobody likes bug hunting, but it’s a necessity if you ever want to put your project to bed so you can go on to the next one — or if you ever want to get back to binging more episodes of whatever it is you’re watching on Netflix right now. It makes sense, therefore, that you have a solid debugging tool at your disposal to help streamline the process. With Firefox so ubiquitous, it only makes sense for Mozilla to have come up with a browser-specific set of debugging tools — that’s just what Firebug browser plugin does for the Firefox-focused web developer.

Site Performance Testing Tools

Coding and debugging a site is just the first step in finishing the job. You’ve also got to optimize its performance regarding how well it loads under different conditions. This way, you can guarantee that your end user will have the most seamless and responsive experience when using your site — and that your client won’t get a stack of complaints from their customers over how slow the site loads. The best way to avoid those headaches is through the use of a site performance monitoring tool like Pingdom that can track all manner of statistics such as uptime and downtime. And not just for HTML, either — the best site performance monitors also take into account CSS, RSS, Javascript, and images as well.