Our developers give some insight into their favourite development tools and applications, including our own invention: Lynchburg.
We spoke to our team of friendly developers to get some insight into the sort of tools they use to create amazing websites.
Top web development tools
React
React is a JavaScript library at the forefront of functional reactive programming. This tool allows developers to create real live interactive apps/websites, things like Facebook chat, the predictive search box on Google are examples of the possibilities this library opens up.
ReactiveX is a very powerful and forward thinking technology that offers up new avenues for innovation in websites and applications by allowing interactivity that brings back information without a reloading the page.
Git Version Control
Git is a really powerful version control system that allows the team to keep track of their code, develop features, perform upgrades, and, if needed, roll-back to previous versions of the code.
Code can be pushed with a simple command making deployment to staging and production servers a breeze.
Bitbucket and Github host the git repositories and provide collaboration, code review, and code management tools that allow the team to work collaboratively without fear of overwriting each other’s code.
‘Bitbucket provides visibility on all our projects along with a code review process for a very reasonable cost.’ – Tom, Back-end Developer.
CodeKit
CodeKit is a great web development tool for speeding up our website builds. It has many innovative features, including compiling SASS, minifying JavaScript and previewing sites as they are being constructed.
Codekit has a built in server, so it automatically refreshes your browser as you make changes to a site’s code. You can allow other people and devices connected to the same LAN to preview your site too – a handy feature for demonstrating your locally developed site to colleagues and testing builds across devices.
Image Optim
ImageOptim is a useful free app that reduces file sizes for images (pngs and jpegs), without affecting the quality. The application is a breeze to use, simply drag and drop the files you want to optimise into the ImageOptim window and the files are optimised.
Lynchburg
Named after the birthplace of Jack Daniels whiskey, Lynchburg is our new, in-house, front-end starting point for projects. This web development tool allows us to quickly and efficiently hit the ground running on any new job with minimal fuss and setup time.
Building on thoughtbot’s excellent Bourbon Sass mixin library, and its accompanying responsive framework, Neat, we built Lynchburg to be infinitely flexible so it’s perfect to use across jobs of any size.
Watch this space, because Lynchburg will soon be open-source and available to the community via our GitHub page very soon.
