8 tools I use on a daily basis as a developer
I’m a weak man, I hardly resist the temptation of trying out the new shiny tools. An impossible task given the myriad of new products shared every day. And yet, there are a few tools that stick with my daily routine.
It’s funny now that I think about it because I use most of them without even noticing it. They’re not tools but rather power-ups over things I do everyday. That’s the beauty of great products: they’re so useful they become invisible.
But let’s skip the marketing blabla and get to the point. Here are 8 tools I use daily, in no particular order:
Recordit
A desktop application that records your screen. You can draw a zone and press “record”. The recording is hosted on their server which means you can share it right away. It comes in two forms: video and gif. I use it especially to show a reproduction of a bug or go through a user interface interaction.
Lately, I also used it to create a gif to showcase a Chrome extension I made: contrib-awakens.
GitHub Hovercard
This Chrome extension dedicated to GitHub adds tooltips to issues, pull requests, comments and literally everything. For example, you can hover a pull request to have a preview of it. A must have, one may say.
Download GitHub Hovercard for Chrome.
Grammarly
As you probably noticed, I’m not a native english speaker. But thankfully, Grammarly is here to help and displays warnings when it spots mistakes. And it’s not just about stupid typos, it’s really helping me improving my english writing. At least I hope so!
Download Grammarly for Chrome.
LastPass
Do yourself a favor: forget about your passwords and leave them to LastPass. It’s a free tool that generates and remember your passwords. Well, technically you still need to keep in mind 1 password: LastPass’. But that’s it. There’s a paying plan but the free one is more than enough. Also, you can install a mobile application to have access to your passwords anywhere.
npmhub
Displays GitHub (and GitLab, for that matter) repositories dependencies. They’re separated in two categories: production and development. It’s great for quick looks over a project’s dependency size but also to discover cool projects. I don’t know about you but I rarely dig into a package.json. With this extension, I often stumble upon interesting packages.
OctoLinker
Once again a GitHub enhancer. This one makes import paths clickable so you can navigate through them. For example, you can click on the path in import foo from ‘../foo’ to open foo.js. It’s not JavaScript specific though, it supports a bunch of languages.
Download Octolinker for Chrome.
Refined GitHub
Yeah I know, that’s a lot of GitHub stuff. This one is hard to describe as it adds quite a lot of nifty things. Here are a few highlights from the readme:
- Linkifies branch references in pull requests
- Linkifies URLs in code
- Linkifies issue references in code comments
- Adds user avatars to Reactions
- Shows current filename in the sticky pull request header
- Shows user’s full name in comments
- Adds labels to comments by the original poster
Download Refined GitHub for Chrome.
Wizipsum
Shameless plug here since this one’s my creation. It’s a Chrome extension that lets you insert a title, paragraph of text, email address or URL into inputs. By default, it will insert funny programmers puns so check it out!
And… That will be it. I hope you will enjoy those tools as much as I do. And please feel free to share your own list, I’m eager to discover what improves your routine 👍
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