March 21, 2016
4.5 Minute Read.
The technology industry is exploding in Vancouver at the moment. There is opportunity everywhere for skilled people with a willingness to learn. The first step for anyone wanting to become a coder is filling their code toolkit.
Here we will discuss the two tools you will need to get on your way: your text editor and your browser.
Text Editors
Websites are built with HTML files. These files are basic text documents that are formatted with special rules in order to create the content’s structure. While you can use a basic editor like notepad or textEdit, they are much better options
Great programs like Sublime Text, Atom, or Text Wrangler offer a huge range of features that will help you write code faster and more efficiently. While you are writing code in one these programs they will highlight the code to help you find mistakes and read to code.
While they are similar, they excel in different ways. Here’s a quick run down of each option.
Text Wrangler (OSX, Free): This editor has been around for a long time, it’s a very dependable and full featured editor for your mac.
Sublime Text (OSX & Windows, Trial then $70): This editor is used in a lot of professional settings. It offers a huge selection of external packages that extend the original functionality to do some really neat things.
Atom (OSX & Windows, Free): Built by the team at GitHub (A great network of coders and projects), Atom is a code editor built with Javascript. Like Sublime Text, it offers a wide range of packages that extend the basic functionality.
As for which one you should use, I would suggest either Sublime Text or Atom. Both are full featured, similar and cross platform. This way when you start to work in teams you will be more likely to be using something similar already.
Browsers
Chances you might be using the browser your system came with. Likely either Internet Explorer or Safari. These browser might be alright for browsing the web, but they lack some of the key features that developers need to build great sites.
I would recommend checking out Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox Developer Edition. Both are great and come with a range of tools for working your HTML, Javascript and CSS.
Always remember to check your websites across all of your browsers. Although browsers interpret your code in a similar way, there are differences. You may find some websites misbehave most in different versions of IE. It’s very important that even if your computer can’t run IE you find a way to test it.
Happy coding!