Many people who want to learn programming have common questions, and one of the main ones is precisely which tools companies typically use in their day-to-day work. And when we’re still developing our knowledge and don’t have direct contact with the professional field, we find ourselves wondering how they work, what tools they use, and how the software itself is actually built. And with the use of these tools, how has this improved our day-to-day work?

Today Rhuan Yago, from our development team, came to share a little bit about the most used tools here at Made4it.

Tools

Visual Studio

Visual Studio Code is a source code editor designed to help programmers in their day-to-day work, featuring various plugins to help further improve code quality, including code completion and code refactoring. It’s also customizable, allowing users to change the editor’s theme, keyboard shortcuts, and preferences. It speeds up coding, helps with code indentation and writing functions, among other things.

We also use the SSH extension to communicate with our server and work directly with our files, without having to do this locally and then pass it to the server.

Terminal

We use the terminal a lot to access the client’s servers, our servers to be able to see logs that help us a lot in what may be happening and what we are treating, to access the database of each client and we use SSH (Secure Socket Shell) for this.

What is SSH?

It is a network protocol that allows us, as users, to access and manage servers remotely, thereby enabling encrypted communication between machines (the user’s computer) and servers. It also features an authentication mechanism that uses advanced encryption to conceal data and transactions from anyone accessing the system, ensuring that only authorized users can access the specific resources they intend to access.

The command works as follows:

Example: ssh {user}@{host}

• ssh is where we indicate the use of the SSH command, that we want to open a secure, encrypted connection.
• {user} – is the account you want to log into as a root user, with full rights to touch anything on the server.
• {host} – is the machine we want to access by entering the specific IP number or domain name.

After this process we are asked for the username and password to access the account.

Bitbucket

It is a controlled project hosting service where we can upload our project in two versions, the version where we upload it on a specific day of the week for better security of the files and an encrypted version with the production version of the project.

Bootstrap

Bootstrap is an open-source framework where we develop our interface (front-end) using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, where we improve the user experience in a friendly and responsive site, where it is all the visual part that our client sees, from the graphics, menus, logos, reports and other things.

We are currently using version 3.3.7 of the framework along with it we use the AdminLTE template where we have a productivity gain by changing the layout as we wish.

Languages

PHP

PHP is a programming language for developing web applications and websites. It is easy to use, robust, and constantly improving, making it one of the most valued languages on the market today. It is a server-side language, which means that it allows the elements of a page to be loaded before they are displayed to the user accessing a site and has a faster response time and connection to large databases. The idea of using this language is to decrease the loading time of the pages, letting the server work in a light way to load plugins and site applications. And today it is used in several companies, such as Facebook, Google, Spotify, and others.

Today it is our main language for the system, we currently use version 7.2 where it provides us with all the features we need. We work with Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), which consists in dividing our code, making it better and better. We currently work with a few types of databases and an API where php makes it easy to connect between them, because we use a server on each client, where each client has its own database. We work with the following banks:

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• SQLServer
• TopSapp (API)

We have several scripts running today where they do all the automatic process from the process of updating the system at the clients, backing up the system, creating the database, sending e-mails and reports, searching and displaying the information, from charts and reports.

Python

Today it is a high-level language and very versatile, we can access a library that offers us several features for our system, this technology is present in some companies like Netflix, Instagram, Spotify, Google and Facebook.

We use it today in version 3.7 and it serves us in some cases, such as one where we send all clients a daily report with various information such as the clients connected in the last 48 hours, the Top 10 users who were most disconnected in the last 24 hours, and others throughout the day. And also for our SA where we basically make the connection to the router to get the commands and input and output to our Realtime (Chart that we visualize the traffic of each client) and that was the best language at the moment to mess with this router communication.

JavaScript

As the years went by, Internet pages became more and more complex and required a more advanced way of interacting with browsers and users. And with its advancement they have made everyone’s day-to-day life much easier. Today there is not a single website that does not use this technology, basically websites today would be impossible without it.

But how does JavaScript work? Instead of running remotely on servers on the Internet as is the case with our php, JavaScript is characterized by running programs on the client side, as we usually say. As such, JavaScript provides web pages with the ability to transform and process incoming and outgoing data, interacting with our HTML language content and the styling of that content provided by CSS on these pages. We use it a lot for capturing information, like our reports, our charts, our registrations, basically the whole system has a lot of JavaScript behind it. Where we get the information without the user seeing the process that is being done behind, which in this case is when we do a process that the user doesn’t see the screen doing this execution, or often seeing his screen being “loaded” again.

CSS

As stated above, CSS is a language for styling elements written in a language we know as HTML. It basically separates the visual content of the site. With it, we can give color to the system, change the texts, the background, the fonts, the spacing, our tables. We can also adjust images for respective screens and devices.

SQL

Those three little letters have become a huge deal these days with the evolution of technology. It’s a language that’s everywhere and used in various fields. Today, we use it to interact with our customers’ database; it enables a large part of the system’s operation, allowing it to scale effectively; and we use it to insert, collect, modify, and delete data.

Conclusion

Every day, we are exposed to rapid technological advancements, which motivates us to keep improving—striving to advance both our software and our knowledge so that we can deliver the best possible user experience to our customers. Our goal is to continuously improve our software by leveraging new programming languages, tools, technologies, and the wealth of knowledge we’ve acquired.

These are the tools our development team uses here at Made4it. Were you already familiar with them, or do you use them too? Share with us the tools you use.