The internet has a lot of tools developed by the community to ease our lives as front-end devs. Here is a list of my favourite go-to tools that have personally helped me with my work.

1. EnjoyCSS

To be honest, although I do a lot of front-end dev, I am too much good with CSS but instead of doing custom CSS styles I prefer this tool to work smart & fast. This very simple tool is my savior in hard times. It lets you design your elements with a simple UI and gives you the relevant CSS output.

2. Prettier Playground

Prettier is a code formatter with support for JavaScript, including ES2017, JSX, Angular, Vue, Flow, TypeScript, and more. It removes your original styling and replaces it with standard consistent styling adhering to the best practices. This handy tool has been very popular in our IDEs, but it also has an online version — a playground where you can prettify your code.

3. Postman

Postman is a tool that has been in my developer toolset since the beginning of my dev career. It has been very useful to check my endpoints in the back end. It has definitely earned its position on this list. Endpoints such as GET, POST, DELETE, OPTIONS, and PUT are included. You should definitely use this tool.

4. StackBlitz

StackBlitz allows you to set up your Angular, React, Ionic, TypeScript, RxJS, Svelte, and other JavaScript frameworks with just one click. You can start coding in less than five seconds because of this handy feature.

I have found this tool quite useful, especially when trying out sample code snippets or libraries online. You would not have the time to create a new project from scratch just to try out a new feature. With StackBlitz, you can simply try out the new NPM package in less than a few minutes without creating a project locally from scratch. Nice, right?

5. Bit.dev

One basic principle of software development is code reusability. This enables you to reduce your development, as you’re not required to build components from scratch.

This is exactly what Bit.dev does. It allows you to share reusable code components and snippets and thereby allows you to reduce your overhead and speed up your development process.

It also allows for components to be shared among teams, which lets your team collaborate with others.

Components are your design system. Build better together.

Bit.dev

As quoted by Bit.dev, this component hub is also suitable to be used as a design system builder. By allowing your team of developers and designers to work together, Bit.dev is the perfect tool for building a design system from scratch.

Bit.dev now supports React, Vue, Angular, Node, and other JavaScript frameworks.

6. CanIUse

This online tool can be very handy, as it allows you to find out whether the feature you are implementing is compatible with the browsers you are expecting to cater to.

I have had many experiences where some of the functionalities used in my application were not supported on other browsers. I learned the hard way that you have to check for browser compatibility. One instance was that a particular feature wasn’t supported in my portfolio project on Safari devices. I figured that out a few months after deployment.

To see this in action, let’s check which browsers support the WebP image format.

As you can see, Safari and IE are not currently supported. This means you should have a fallback option for incompatible browsers. The code snippet below is the most commonly used implementation of WebP images to support all browsers.

Conclusion

I have tried to fit the best tools I have encountered in my dev career. If you think there are any worthy additions, please do comment below. Happy coding!

Thank you for reading, and let’s connect!

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But there are times when a little extra money on the side is much appreciated. Be it because you are still in college or university, you want to start to work for yourself rather than for others, you have a child and want to spend more time with them, you still need to make some cash or you’re doing it just for the fun of it.

Here is the good thing: As a programmer, you have everything you need to increase the cash flow. Your brain, your laptop — that’s all you really need. Interested? Check out the following strategies and decide what fits best for you.

Start to Freelance

Freelancing can be a great thing. No (real) boss, a tremendous amount of projects to choose from, high daily rates for specialists, as many holidays as you want…the list goes on.

However, it requires a lot of discipline and effort to find clients and projects. The biggest advantage to me is that you can start freelancing next to your permanent job, be it in the evenings or on the weekends.

Platforms like Upwork or Fiverr seem to offer a lot of opportunities especially for doing things on the sidelines but be aware of the competition over there.

Additionally, rates are pretty low so I would only recommend this if you just want to dip your toes into the water for the first time or are satisfied with only a little bit of additional income.

A better strategy would be to work on your LinkedIn profile, contact recruiters and past clients from your network, go to conferences and meetups, and look out for platforms that match up remote workers with companies.

Participate in Coding Contests

Yes, this is a real thing. There are dedicated platforms that organize programming contests for real prize money.

One of the biggest is Topcoder with more than a million members and a lot of competitions. They have three main focus areas: design, data science, and development.

You would work on real projects initiated by more than 2000 companies or single matches against opponents. Fun is guaranteed, so is a fast learning curve.

And other lots of sites available like, CodersRank, HackerRank, CodeChef and lot more.

If you like challenges, this might be something for you. However, there is competition and you cannot count on a steady flow of income so make this one a lower priority.

Start to Write

In my opinion, writing still is one of the best ways to reach a broad audience. There are plenty of opportunities for you to start writing and make money out of it:

• You can start your own blog and monetize with ad revenue.
• You can write books or ebooks and sell them online.
• You can write on platforms such as Medium and participate in their Partnership Programs.
• You can write guest posts for established sites like CSS-Tricks that will pay you a fixed amount if your article is accepted.

There is nothing wrong with trying things out and seeing how people react to what you write.

However, some things that you should consider are to choose a niche where you have a special interest in (keeps you motivated), to keep writing consistently (it takes time to get recognized), and to constantly improve your writing skills to deliver high-quality articles (people will thank you, there is more than enough low-quality stuff out there….).

Record and Sell Online Courses

Being able to teach people online is one of the best things that emerged over the last decade and will be around for at least another decade if not longer, in my opinion.

The benefits for both students and teachers are massive. Students can choose from a wide range of offerings and learn on their own schedule. Teachers reach 1000s or 100,000s of people with their content.

If you have experience with programming, ideally expert knowledge in a language like JavaScript or Python (or any other popular language or framework) or even in niche penetration testing and you are able to and have fun teaching others, creating online courses could be your thing.

There are many platforms available for your courses to be published on. Udemy, for example, has round about 75 million visitors a month and anyone can join them.

Other platforms like Frontend Masters or Pluralsight are invite-only but if you have a reputation or a good network — why not?

However, there are a few things to consider when recording your courses:

• Invest in good gear: good microphone and webcam are a must!
• High-quality content is king. Competition is increasing steadily so you need to convince people that you can teach them valuable things.
• Practice speaking loud and clearly.
• Always rework your recordings.
• Create additional material like a GitHub project, presentations, coding examples…

And even if it seems appealing that once a course has been recorded and people start buying it, it will create passive income for you, that is only true to some extent. The best teachers constantly update their courses because technology changes all the time!

Conclusion

There is one last thing I want to tell you that is relevant for each of the above options:

Consistency is king.

No matter what you start — pursue it, stick with it. Most things won’t work overnight. It is hard work, you have to invest time and energy. 99% give up too early. Be among the 1% that are successful!

Thank you for reading, and let’s connect!

Thank you for reading my blog, feel free to subscribe to my email newsletter, and ask questions and give your valuable suggestions.