If you’re developing on a local cloud or need to compile locally, you currently have particle-cli which is fantastic for getting all things Particle setup via command line.
It’s a good chance that you’re using some IDE or text editor to write your code, which results in a bit of a shuffle between your terminal and IDE, to execute the make/upload scripts and testing your work.
I wrote a basic Atom package that supports a faster workflow for those of us developing ‘off the Particle.io grid’ – i.e. using local clouds and/or compiling locally. It uses the make scripts provided by spark-firmware and integrates it into the Atom UI, providing rudimentary commands to compile and upload rapidly to a serial port of your choosing. The best analogy to describe this workflow would be like the Arduino IDE, where you select a local device to then compile and upload firmware to.
This is not meant to confuse users with Particle Dev, which is great. I want to share this relatively simple package as I was limited by the non-local, Particle.io-only building capabilities of the Web Build/IDE, which also slowed down the rate at which one could easily go between writing code and testing/experimenting with their Particle devices.
There might be others in the same situation with similar frustrations, and I hope this might help out the community.
So…if you’re developing Particle-cloud based projects, Web Build / Particle Dev is still the best way to do it. For off-gridders, perhaps this package might help? 
Here’s the link to the repo:
Instructions and notes can be found there as well.
(apm/github is giving me some authentication grief over publishing this on atom.io, so you’ll have to install this manually to ~/.atom/packages for now)