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The Ultimate Front-End Toolkit for 2022
Go on… embrace the clickbait!
It’s nearly time to say goodbye to 2021 — or good riddance if you like! — and an excellent opportunity to reflect and take stock. It’s been fascinating seeing the amount of innovation in the front end space, albeit rather daunting considering the sheer amount of choice.
However, I’ve noticed my tech stack has remained pretty constant for most of this year, which is a good indication it’s working well. Everything runs so harmoniously that I won’t be straying from my current setup any time soon. In fact, the last time I remember feeling this content, I was slicing up PSDs and exporting them into Dreamweaver!
So, without further ado, let’s take a look at my go-to Front-End toolkit for 2022.
The Essentials
Irrespective of project type, I literally start every Front-End project with the following:
VSCode
It’s been 6 years since I dumped Sublime Text, flirted a little bit with Atom, and went on to find true love with Visual Studio Code. The code editing experience is slick, intuitive, and unrivaled. It has just the right amount of high-quality features out of the box and a plethora of marvelous plugins to suit your every need. Also, VSCode has some of the best-looking in-app release notes I’ve ever seen. Well done, Microsoft!
Prettier
That’s right, I’m putting a little code formatting tool in the same category as VSCode!
Before Prettier, if I wanted to standardise on code format, I would first have to define a style guide (which is more complicated than it seems) and then find the relevant ESLint rules to match it. But Prettier is opinionated, so you don’t have to be! Additionally, the value of automatically formatting on save is not to be taken for granted — it dramatically reduces cognitive effort and saves a ton of time.
