Programming

3 Game-Changing Software Development Tools for Me

Photo by Dan Cristian Pădureț on Unsplash

Whether one is a carpenter or a software engineer, tools play a crucial role in our productivity.

I am a backend engineer. Let me walk you through my three game-changing software development tools.

i3 — window manager

i3 is a tiling window manager and allows us to arrange windows into mutually non-overlapping frames, as shown below.

i3 tiling windows with workspace and status bar. Source: i3-screens

Why do I use this tool?

Workspaces — Workspaces are truly a game-changer for me. I can easily switch contexts as I change a workspace.

You can think of a workspace as a room.

Living room is for relaxing or spending time with loved ones.

Bedroom is for sleeping.

Similarly, you can dedicate your workspaces as follows.

Workspace 1: Browsing + instant messaging

Workspace 2: Development

…

When something comes up, for instance, you encounter a problem in your production system. You can easily switch context, resolve the issue and resume where you left off by simply changing a workspace.

Less use of a mouse — Switching between windows can be easily done using a keyboard (without using a mouse).

Quick overview without running commands — The status bar gives a quick overview, and we can configure it as per our needs. This way, we don’t need to run commands to find whether we are in VPN or not.

Check out i3

DBeaver

It is SQL client software for people who need to work with databases.

One client for all popular databases — Screenshot by the author.

Why do I use this tool?

Different color scheme— There is a setting called Connection Typeas shown in the picture below. As you can see, there are different colors for different environments.

Snapshot by the author — Source

Due to this color scheme, this tool helps me to distinguish between different environments.

Extra prompts for the production system — Furthermore, it prompts me when I try to run sensitive queries on the production system (provided that the connection type is production).

I am impressed by this feature because it keeps an eye on when I am working on the production system.

Check out dbeaver

fish shell

fish is a smart and user-friendly command line shell for Linux, macOS, and the rest of the family.

Why do I use this tool?

• Auto-completion

Fish shell auto-completion — Source

• Syntax highlighting

fish shell — Syntax highlighting

• Bash prompt

Various options for bash prompts

bash prompt with git branch name

Checkout fish shell

If you love pandas dataframes, then you might love nushell.
I haven't tried it yet but I will definitely check it out.

Thanks for reading.

Anas Anjaria

Site reliability engineering

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Anas Anjaria

Programming

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