Many people who want to learn programming have common questions, and one of the main ones is exactly which tools companies usually use in their day-to-day work. And before when we are still developing knowledge and have no direct contact with the professional area, we wonder how they work, what tools they use, how the software itself is made. And with the use of assistive tools, how has this improved in our day-to-day life?

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 that came to help programmers in their day-to-day, having several plugins to help further improve the code, having intelligent code, code refactoring, and is also customizable, allowing users to change the editor theme, shortcut keys and preferences. With it, we have more speed, speed in coding, and it helps us in endenting code and writing functions, among many 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 users to access and manage servers remotely and thus makes an encrypted communication between machines (User’s Computer) and servers. And with that it has an authentication mechanism, where advanced cryptography is applied that hides the data and transactions from those who are accessing to where exactly we are wanting 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 little three letters are the giant thing nowadays with the evolution of technology. It is a language that is everywhere and in many areas. Today we use them to interact with our customers’ databases, with it we get a large part of the system’s operation so that it is possible for the system to walk in scale, with it we insert data, collect, change, and delete them.

Conclusion

Every day we are subject to a great evolution in technology and this makes us want to improve more every day, trying to evolve both our software and our knowledge to have a delivery in the best possible usability for our customers, in order to always be improving our software since it is using new languages, tools, technologies and much of the knowledge acquired.

These are the tools that our development team uses here at Made4it, did you already know or do you also use these tools? Share with us the tools you use