BlogAgile of One
I've worked in an Agile environment my whole career and it works pretty well in a team setting. I've used Jira and Team Foundation Server in a professional setting and they are both great at keeping things organized.
But what should you use when you don't have the backing of a corporation to afford such tools? In this article I lay out all the tools I use to develop great apps for as little as possible.
Project Management - Trello
Link to Trello
Trello is basically a simplified version of Jira. You can easily create each column you want (Backlog, TODO, In Progress, Done) as well as create cards for your project. Even if you're the only one looking at it, I've found it essential in keeping my projects organized. The best part is it's free to use alone.
Version Control - Github
Github is the gold standard in both personal and professional software development. Free to use for personal projects.
Deployments - Vercel
Deployments
Vercel has a suite of deployment tools that make deployments the easiest I've ever experienced. A pull request or commit to your main branch automatically kicks off a build that deploys when successful. You can rollback if there are any issues with the click of a button.
Live Branches
Vercel also builds any feature branches and lets you preview it online. This is great when needing a sign off from team members or clients.
Personal Projects on Vercel are free and it's professional services start at $20 / month.
Images - Adobe Express
Graphic design is my passion... kinda. It's something you need for your site and in a professional setting I've had the pleasure of working with very talented digital artists. For my own projects however, I need a tool that is both user friendly and, well... cheap. I made all of the graphics using the free tier of Adobe Express and I've been really impressed with how much I get out of it.
Not only can I whip up some graphics quickly I'm also given an online folder to keep my projects in.
With these tools you can plan and execute really great web applications quickly.
Blogging / CMS - Sanity.IO
On another project I completed recently, I attempted to roll my own blog via a database. While I got it working I noticed it was getting in my way when I needed to make an update or add a new blog. Sanity makes it much easier to manage blogs and add them to your site via simple queries.
On top of blog management you can configure pages so that your entire site's content is driven with Sanity. This is perfect for when your site / business scales and people that may be less tech saavy need to make content changes to your site.