Hack School
Developer Tools

Developer Tools

Software development can be made easier with the right tools. While it can be easy to waste time finding the perfect toolkit, there are always a few standard tools that enhance the development experience

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a lightweight text editor and development environment. It has a rich developer community and support for a multitude of languages! It's the development environment of choice for Hack School given its ease of use and expansive extensions.

Download Visual Studio Code for your operating system here (opens in a new tab).

Live Server (VS Code Extension)

Live Server is a popular Visual Studio Code extension that launches a local development server with live reload capability for static and dynamic pages. This means every time you save your HTML, CSS, or JavaScript file, the browser will automatically refresh to show your changes instantly.

Why use Live Server?

  • Instantly preview your website as you code
  • No need to manually refresh the browser
  • Great for learning and rapid prototyping

How to use:

  1. Install the Live Server extension (opens in a new tab) from the VS Code Extensions marketplace.
  2. Open your project folder in VS Code.
  3. Right-click on your index.html (or any HTML file) and select "Open with Live Server".
  4. Your default browser will open the page, and any changes you make will be reflected automatically upon saving.

This tool is especially useful for beginners to see their progress in real time and for quickly iterating on web projects.

Postman

When developing APIs, it's critical to test them. Postman (opens in a new tab) provides an environment for doing just that! With Postman, you can mock API requests/responses, bundle collections for a particular environment, and ensure that your APIs are production-quality.

Sending a request is easy–you can adjust the request type (e.g., GET, POST, PUT) with the corresponding API route. We'll have more specifics about APIs during week 4, but you can also adjust parameters, headers, auth settings, and variables here! Once you send a request, you can see the response below.

A GET request

Postman also allows you to send requests with a body (for example, POST requests). You can send requests in various formats–we'll use JSON here:

A POST request

Download Postman for your operating system here (opens in a new tab).

Week 4: Debugging and DeploymentGit/GitHub