Visual Studio Code Header

5 Must Have Visual Studio Code Extensions

This article looks at improving the effectiveness which developers can write code in Visual Studio Code through the use of extensions. Having an effective development environment makes writing great software both faster and easier. Visual Studio Code is a relatively new open-source IDE primarily developed by Microsoft. VS Code is targeted mainly at developing languages that traditionally haven’t been easy to develop in Visual Studio with such as JavaScript, Python, etc. It has full debugger and breakpoint support for languages that otherwise usually don’t have an easy to use debugger such as JavaScript.

1. Instant Markdown

Instant markdown example

As developers working effectively with markdown files typically used within version control systems such as Git for things such as changelogs or readmes, is very important. This extension makes working with markdown from within VS Code a lot simpler. It also allows viewing as the file is being edited which proves to be an invaluable feature for documentation writing and more. Download and installation instructions found on the visual studio marketplace.

Continue reading →

Laptop With Code Header

Increase Website Performance

Increasing website performance is a huge topic that is often overlooked by developers, especially novices. This is becoming an even larger problem with the increase of readily available JavaScript plugins and ever growing bloat from CMS providers. Site performance is not only a defining factor in the SEO ranking you receive from search engines like Google but it is also the number 1 factor in deciding if a user stays on your site or not. If you can improve performance you can almost certainly improve customer retention or any other number of metrics. This article aims to provide an absolute basic example on how to increase a websites performance.

Analyze Site Speed

First things first you need to check what the current state of your website’s performance is before you try and improve it. The fact might be you could have an absolutely blazing fast site without any of these suggestions required. The main tools I use in this area are; Google PageSpeed, GTmetrix & WebPageTest. These three tools all offer a similar selection of tools however it is a good idea to use a combination rather than rely on a single source. One good feature about WebPageTest is that it offers the ability to see how the site will perform from different geographic locations and from different browsers.

Continue reading →