28 free resources for web developers

Below you will find a curated list of resources I have found useful in my endevours designing and developing web applications.

Blogs

• Flavio Copes - seemingly endless articles on a wide variety of technical subjects. Most articles are related to web development.
• 7 Practical Tips for Cheating at Design - a great list of tips to keep in mind when doing web design. They do a fantastic job explaining the concepts, and the article is written to help developers who may struggle with design.
• UX Collective - curated stories on UX, usability, and design.

GitHub repositories

• freeCodeCamp - freeCodeCamp has a repository that's home to their open source codebase and curriculum.
• free-for.dev - a list of software products which have free tiers for developers.
• Free programming books - a list of free programming books, with many available languages.
• Awesome podcasts - a list of podcasts, most of which are development related.
• Marketing for Engineers - a curated list of marketing resources for developers.

Colors

• Coolors - generate and browse color palletes.
• ColorHunt - curated color pallettes, great for inspiration.

Communities

• IndieHackers - a great community focused on helping people build and run internet businesses. This site has an entreprenuerial leaning, but most of the members seem to be developers.
• Hacker News - Y Combinator's news site. There is lots of interesting content here daily.
• Dev.to - Dev.to is a community of software developers helping each other.

Inspiration

• Dribbble
• Best Website Gallery
• Site Inspire - web design inspiration.
• Awwwards - web design trends.

YouTube Channels (less web focused)

• ThinMatrix - a great devlog from ThinMatrix, the solo developer of Equillinox. He showed his journey developing, and successfully releasing the game. He's now working on a new project, a city building game. His uploads are infrequent but they are always high quality and entertaining.
• Bisqwit - very technical, but also very interesting videos.
• Brackeys - the king of Unity Engine tutorials.

No code tools (not free)

• Carrd - visual builder for one-page sites. Comes with some great templates. This is my go-to for getting a landing page up and running quickly.
• Webflow - build custom websites using a visual canvas. Webflow allows more freedom, and more functionality-rich sites than Carrd, but it has a steeper learning curve.

Dev Tools

• Trello - card-based project tracking.
• Upvoty - a tool to get feedback on project development roadmaps through user voting. I briefly used this when developing Discord Bot Studio and found it had everything I needed at a fairly low price point.
• GitBook - my go-to choice for creating product documentation. They have a free plan which even allows using a custom domain.
• Visual Studio Code - this one won't be new to most people, but it's too good to leave off the list. Free, open source IDE with great extension support.
• Postman - GUI for testing and developing APIs.
• Hugo - static site generator. Hugo claims to be the fastest framework for building websites. I can't verify if that's totally true or not, but I've been impressed. This site is made with Hugo; I wrote about that here.