I want to take this time to say thank you and congratulate you for taking the first step to creating the perfect development environment. This series contains solid techniques on how to setup your ideal development environment. Throughout this series, you will learn the in’s and out’s of multiple development environments, text editors (Vi, Vim, Atom, Sublime, Brackets), understand how to work with local, virtual and private clouds (VirtualBox, Vagrant, Cloud9), you will also learn how to automate the most common task using the command line. But most importantly you will have a good understanding of what to look for when you are creating your “ideal” development environment.
Say Hello
My intention with this series is to get you up and running with your ideal development environment. If for whatever reason you might have a question, comment or suggestion about the series, I encourage you to take the time and write into Code With Intent.
Prerequisites before getting started
Before getting started with this series, you need to have a clear understanding of the following concepts to enable you to be successful with this series.
- Basic command line experience
If for what ever reason you are not completely comfortable with the above requirements, I have provided some resources for you to get you going before getting started with this series.
Software and Hardware are constantly evolving this series uses the following operating system’s as a baseline.
Software
- OSX 10.10 or higher
- Ubuntu 12.04 or higher
- Windows 7 or higher
- Modern Browser (Firefox, Chrome, Safari)
Hardware
- Minimum of 2GB of free memory
- 4GB of free hard drive space (optional)
This series will only focus on the mentioned operating systems, if you are running a earlier version of one the mentioned operating systems, this guide will need to be modified to work with that operating system. I would recommend you to just read the abstracts of every chapter and get an idea for what you need and then move on.
Code Samples
The series contains a variety of code samples and snippets that are used to illustrate a specific part of the series. None of the code builds upon each other, feel free to fork any part of the code and use it for your own setup.
All of the snippets used throughout the series are released under the MIT License.
The complete list of the snippets can be found on github.
What to expect out of the series?
This series is used as an educational mean, to convey one main message.
Setting up the perfect Development Environment
This series is NOT here to teach you how to use this tools, some of this tools take years to master. Each of the tools that I cover, have a wealth of resources where you can learn more about them.
I will not be covering shortcuts, the command line, system administration, or macros. This series is to help you understand what tools you need to make you a more productive developer, by helping you automate some of the systems that help you create software.
Remember: The key to being a GREAT programmer is being able to learn new skills.
Questions and Answers
Is this series language agnostic? No, this series was design with one specific developer in mind, a JavaScript developer. If you are using another language such as C++, Java, Go, Perl etc this series is not for you.
Will you cover IDE’s, for example Netbeans, WebStorm etc? Nope.
Does this series have a bias towards an operating system? Yes! This series does have a bias for *nix systems. Why? for me is due to my background in Computer Science and the bias from my instructors at my University, for others it could be a number of different reasons.
Will you cover how to use the command line? Nope.
I always had a passion for the field of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and I knew I wanted to do something to make a difference in the world. I just didn’t know where to start. I was an immigrant in a new country, grew up in a tough environment, and wasn’t sure how… Read More
