Here at The Gartrell Group, we spend a lot of time building and debugging web maps. While we do our fair share of architecting and back-end work, for the past few years, we’ve definitely been JavaScripting more than anything else. In reflecting on how much time we spend in the JS space, I decided to take an opportunity to express my gratitude to our daily companion that is Chrome DevTools.
It all started with Firebug.
An image on the Firebug page…
Firebug was like a cool drink of water in the middle of a desert...
15 years ago I needed a better understanding of what was going on under the hood of my web projects and Firebug was pretty much the only game in town… I think Chrome had just barely hit the shelves and my nose was still firmly turned up to the notion of a Google Browser (my how things change). Internet Explorer offered a sort of debugging tool but it lacked usability and functionality (and…it was Internet Explorer). Overnight, Firebug became my Swiss army knife for monitoring AJAX calls, injecting DOM elements, and reviewing global variables - productivity power-up!! Prior to browser debugging tools, the only way I knew of to interact with a website was by executing JavaScript typed into the browser address bar (OMFG - it actually worked.). Since search has overtaken what you submit in the address bar, this terrible parlor trick is merely a memory…
Chrome eventually replaced Firefox for me, due in no small part to the fantastic built-in developer tools; Firebug became part of Firefox, Microsoft improved Internet Explorer’s development tools and web devs across the planet rejoiced.
Writing business software to solve problems like tallying bananas, updating a twitter feed, or integrating your dishwasher into your Alexa network entails a fairly linear development arc with a straightforward problem space. Web programming on the other hand can be a more spiraling affair involving continuous integration and tedious revision. The interactive editing allowed by DevTools quickly becomes invaluable and includes a massive host of functionality but beyond that it achieves that most sacred of software goals, it just works. So much software advertises feature richness and reliability, but so often it fails to deliver. DevTools delivers. Moreover, as heavily as we use it, I get the sense that we’re probably only scratching the surface of what is possible with it.
I was prompted to write this homage after being floored by the ability to browserify some node modules, inject them into a web page, and automate some data retrieval. Again, it just worked.
We at TGG wish to thank the developers and maintainers of Chrome DevTools and the Chrome Browser for increasing our productivity, and the productivity of our clients. Keep making software that just works.