Developer life made easy
Published on 26/1/2019
I t’s been a great journey so far from a .Net developer to an SPFx developer (I left out a dark phase of SharePoint early development days). What makes it more exciting are the tools you get to use from start to finish. In this post I am going to list out my most favourite tools and references that makes my work much quicker and efficient. You don’t have to re-invent the wheel most of the time. Reuse and keep sharing, it is the key to SMART working. I will take a moment and say thanks to the great Microsoft Community who makes it possible for us to stay passionate about developing new stuff in the Microsoft product stack. Over the couple of years developers like me have been revived from a daily boring 9-5 job to a more passionate-hobby-and-getting-paid-for-it kind of situation. The start was however this link - Build your first SharePoint client-side web part (Hello World part 1), if you know what I mean. Let's dive in to the topic now
My Developer Essentials
Code References
It’s a very fortunate time to be a developer with the community being so active and passionate about development. It amazes me to see how much code people share online with the community and it’s free. My most favourite sample are here- sp-dev-fx-webparts (obviously cause I love SPFx !)
Postman
For all my API requests while developing, I use Postman. It saves a lot of time before actually developing the app and looking for answers. To set up your development SharePoint tenancy (which is like a one time thing) I use this post, I find his language simple and easy to follow.
JSON Viewer
Sometimes I would like to view my JSON data in a better way to work out the results and I use this online jsonviewer.
CSS Tricks
Don't be fooled by the name of the website, they are not just designers! What makes CSS Tricks a one stop shop for all my design & development fulfilment as I call it, is the way their website looks. Now these guys are serious about their development. Find great blogs for design, react tips and tricks here for your app.
My Design Essentials
I once had an amazing mentor who shaped the way I looked at development. I often got stuck in a practice of getting my functions working ignoring completely how the app looked like. But soon under some guidance I could see how a perfectly working app with an awesome design can blow people's mind in more ways than imaginable.
This was my journey from a programmer of logic to a developer of happy looking products. Take at look at Apple. What makes Apple products so in demand when there are other competitors who do more? It's the Presentation (I am an avid Apple products user myself)
So here are some of my most favourites design references and tools
JsFiddle
This goes without an introduction but save time and play with your mock data and markup here in jsfiddle
CODEPEN
Find loads of cool projects and pens for cool designs here in codepen.io/.
CSS Tricks & References
The Refactoring UI - These guys have great posts and great content for a revelation moment like this. I recently bought their e-book and a non-booker reader like me could not put it down so that says it all.
Free Images
For all the free images I usually use unsplash.com/
Some unsung heroes
Git (no intro please) git-scm.com/downloads
Greeshot for a good screenshot
So that's all guys, I hope I could help someone see the light from all these references. I will be keen to update this post at some point to add more as I find them.