It’s no secret – we love tech. We’re always on the hunt for interesting, innovative new technologies to try and if we can support a startup by using their product, we will.
Our developers are constantly trying new apps to help them get shit done. Here’s 5 of our developers’ favourite web apps at the moment…
1.GitHub
We all use GitHub to publish and share code. With GitHub we can keep an audit trail of our code so we always have access to all the previous versions.
We also use GitHub to check our code, sending pull requests to colleagues who check them for errors before we merge it with the central repo.
2. Semaphore
We use Semaphore to test code before we merge it. Semaphore integrates with GitHub to provide a “build status” for a projects’ tests. This appears in our pull requests, so whoever checks them over will know if the changes being proposed will break the tests (and subsequently the application) if they are accepted.
“Why it’s useful is not everyone will have the project set up on their machine so this allows you to review and check the tests without needing to set up the whole project on your machine” – Pete, web developer
3. Postman
Postman lets you experiment with APIs without the need to write any code.
“It’s easy to tweak inputs and quickly see the output. It supports a range of different authentication methods including oAuth. It keeps a history as well which is great when you come to implement your code. Fun times.” – Tom, Technical Director
4. BrowserStack
We use BrowerStack to test our work on real mobile and desktop browsers.
“Browser stack is great. It allows you to test your site on nearly all types of environments (including mobile) and has a great Java tunnel binary as well” – Adam, web developer
5. Campfire
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – we love Campfire. So it’s not exactly a development tool but our developers would be lost without it. Most of our developers have headphones on all day long and if we had to say everything out loud, we’d never be able to hear ourselves think.
Campfire lets us create chat rooms for all of our projects as well as a watercooler room for general chat. We can control access to rooms so that we can invite clients and subcontractors in safely.
If Campfire is a bit old hat for you, you could also try out HipChat which is pretty great, but we only need one chat tool in the office.
What apps do your development team use? Tell us in the comments and we’ll try to give them a go!
