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).

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.

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:

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