NPM: a solace for a successful web developer’s project.

Four essential practices for web developers to find solutions for their coding problems.

And how to speed up your work on a typical web developer’s project.

NPM

Find solutions for your problems using NPM.

NPM is created by and for developers to share JavaScript code with other developers who have written and found solutions for your daily coding issues. A knowledge base of scripts and a collective intelligence with code to build amazing products (i.e. games, AI, mobile apps, websites or VR apps).

The key is to find a suitable code (mind the amount of bytes!). Consider whether that package saves your time, is well written and has it a big community supporting it.

Why we use NPM?

A typical project of a developer would look like this: you need a web based project HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Then upload your project to your GitHub page and use the source control Git where you commit your changes. Least but not last, you merge dependencies, which are the NPM packages that other developers have written.

Speed up your work with NPM packages using Command Line.

We communicate with computers since 1980s. The command line, better known as Terminal was being used to give instructions to the computer and it gave us the output. The command line was used instead of GUI (Graphical User Interface).

Command lines are much faster, it is a common way to access different computers around the world. For example, to access servers with the database in different countries where your website or web application is hosted. You can also download scripts that other people have written, to use them for your project.

Work in teams with other developers using Git, GitHub.

If you’re working on a project with other developers, your typical day at the office would probably start with a pull request. These are usually projects containing many files and multiple people working on them and saving it on one central location.

Source control.

Nowadays nobody stores their projects on their own computers. Instead, you should use Git for source control and GitHub, a central place to store projects and make changes to files.

Merge conflicts.

As a team, you’re not working on each other’s files. Instead, you’re working on whatever version is on GitHub at that moment. All files you’ve created in your text editor like VSC or Sublime will be uploaded to gitHub.com

Usually, you’d have the project uploaded to GitHub using Terminal. You either create a new repository or fork someone else’s project. But that’s a topic for another day.