Category: Software

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Bower, your new best friend

Bower, your new best friend… Or bird.

Applications grow in size and complexity by the day, and as new needs arise, new tools do too. Bower is one of them, let me tell you about it.

One day, you’re just bringing in jQuery into your nice little project, and then, suddenly, in a weeks time, you need to keep track of a framework, plugins, JS and CSS libraries and whatnot for this other side thing you’re doing. You may just keep a long txt file with a list of CDNs or an overloaded library folder with all of your favorite resources, and that is okay. You’re just missing out on the greatness of Bower, your new best friend.

Today, I’m going to show you the power of NPM and Bower working in tandem. I’ll expand on this in future posts by bringing in a few more tools (Gulp/Grunt, RequireJS, Webpack/Browserify) that you’ll surely find useful, I promise!

Bower is a very handy tool that fetches and brings in anything that you need for your project. That means libraries, frameworks, assets and, according to the official site, rainbows too. Anything that you may ever need is a few keystrokes away.

Before we get into the matter though, we need to get a couple dependencies set up; namely: NPM (Node Package Manager) and Git. Let’s get started.

A tale of text editors and IDEs, the not-so-objective comparison

Let me get this straight and reiterate what the title says. This isn’t an objective comparison by no means, even if I’m trying my best so it actually resembles what an objective software comparison should be (spoiler: I won’t succeed). I also should make a note here, nobody pays me a dime here, so do not worry, this is as objective as my human brain can be -so probably not much.

With all that negativity out of the way, let’s get on topic. There’s TONS of awesome text editors and IDEs out there, but over the years, some of them stand out and rise above the others. Today, I’ll be presenting three of my favourite text editors, so that you, as a newbie or experienced developer, may choose to try them out and decide for yourself -the only actual way of finding out what really works for you.

Bear in mind, that this is directed at front and back-end developers working with JavaScript, HTML and CSS (and their wonderful variety of frameworks) and may not work out for a C or Ruby dev.