Top 5 Resources For Developers

October 11, 2019

As a Web Development company, our developers aim to deliver the best quality websites to our clients. Some complex projects require a non-trivial approach to the development of such elements as animations, interactive forms or responsive interfaces.

Here is my Top 5 list of resources that help me solve non-trivial tasks.

WordPress Codex

https://codex.wordpress.org
Wordpress Codex is the online manual for WordPress and a living repository for WordPress information and documentation. Our developers specialize in building websites on WordPress and its codex is the main source of basic information. Here you can find links to any topics regarding theme development, plugin installation and page customizations. Regular users can find useful information explained in plain language and not requiring coding experience. As a developer I read articles dedicated to professionals, covering all aspects of WordPress coding, hooks and functions.

The WordPress community is very large and WordPress Codex has a lot of user-contributed notes and examples, which are especially helpful. Support Forums on the Codex are also a source of valuable information and support. Plugin authors or theme-developers explain the details of their programs in dedicated forum topics. You can always count on finding solutions in WordPress Codex.

Stackoverflow

https://stackoverflow.com
Stack Overflow is an open community. This website is organized in the form of Question-Answer articles. It has millions of support answers to a large variety of the toughest coding questions. The community votes for the best answer to a problem deciding which of the proposed solutions is better. Not only are the solutions themselves helpful, but also the comments to them. More often than not, I find crucial details for a solution in the comments.

WordPress Codex is dedicated to WordPress-related issues, Stack Overflow, on the other hand, offers solutions to many types of problems: development, styling, browser compatibility, databases, SQL, PHP errors or server settings.

MDN Web Docs

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
MDN Web Docs (previously known as MDN — the Mozilla Developer Network) is an evolving learning platform for Web technologies. All docs at MDN and the site itself are created by an open community of developers. The topics covered include Web standards such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), and JavaScript. Other sections of the website are dedicated to Mozilla-specific topics – Open Web app development and Firefox add-on development.

MDN is a great source of information regarding browser compatibility for different features. While developing a new website, if I ever have any doubt whether the new feature will be supported by all major browsers, I usually check it on MDN. I also value this resource for descriptive examples of code and links to live samples in CodePen and JSFiddle.

PHP.NET

https://www.php.net
This is the official documentation for PHP language (the main language we use for server-side scripting in our WordPress-based development). PHP language is well known for having excellent documentation created by volunteers who collectively make changes every day. Usually, I find helpful definitions of core PHP functions here, check what types of information these functions return and read user notes for any bottleneck cases which I should be aware of. It is worth mentioning that this source is targeted for web-professionals and it will be hard to understand for users with limited coding experience.

Pair Programming

Last but not the least on my Top 5 list of resources is actually not a web-resource, but the help of my fellow developers. Each of us has expertise in certain spheres (dev ops, SEO, accessibility, browser testing, responsive design, web forms, etc) and different levels of experience. It allows us to share our knowledge with peers. Experienced mentors can identify the problem for me and suggest ways to solve it. It is also useful for mentors themselves because when you teach someone you also learn.

There are a lot of other resources online, which I didn’t mention here including sites like Google DevTools, W3 Schools, Codecademy, etc. This list is just a few essential websites in my toolkit that I use every day and couldn’t live without. You may choose the resources specific to your area of expertise, the technology you use or level of experience. I hope some of these resources help you, too!