Software development tools

I recently shared my website address with my relatives. When I shared the address, I had only included a snake game that can be played on the browser. One of my relatives wanted to know if he can download the game and play it offline. I told him he can download the source code from my github account and run it locally on his laptop. I was not surprised when he later told me he can not download the source code.

My relative was in Dannhauser (a small village near Newcastle and yes there is internet there) and I was in Johannesburg. So we were communicating using WhatsApp. As I was typing instructions and tools that he must have in order to be able to successfully run the game, I knew the instructions will overwhelm him. The reason I knew that those instructions will overwhelm him is because I remember the difficulties of knowing which coding tools to use and understanding how to use them when I was an undergraduate student and I had to do physics simulations.

One of the biggest challenges that is faced by people who do not have any background in programming is knowing which tools to use and what those tools can do and can not do. Although different people prefer different tools to write their code, I will share tools that I have used and I think they can easily be used by novice programmers.

The first tool that you may want to have is a text editor. I recommend that you download Visual Studio code. A video showing how to download visual studio code can be found here. I also recommend creating a github account where you can store code of your projects. The second tool you may want to have is Git. Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git will allow you to use the command line of a termianl or command prompt to store your code to github. A video showing how to download visual studio code can be found here

If you will be running JavaScript code, you will need to download Node.js. I also recommend that you download Node Package manager (NPM). If you will be running Python code, you will need to download the latest version of Python.