10 Tools and Websites That Make You a More Productive Developer
As developers, we have a lot on our plate every day, not only regarding to coding, but also everything around it! Things such as using GIT, testing on devices, presentations, and much more.
By optimizing workflows and incorporating tools in our everyday life, we can become even more productive and do more, in less time.
I’ll be sharing 10 tools and websites that help me and my team to be more productive every day. I’m sure that these tools can also make your life easier as a developer. Personally, I find the tools great and they make my team and my own life easier in the everyday.
1. TinyPNG
Often we have to deal with performance on websites, apps etc. Optimized images play a big part in having a fast application. In fact, studies show that images are one of the main factors why websites and apps are very slow. TinyPNG can help you out.
You simply just add your images and TinyPNG will produce optimized images for you.
There is even a developer API so you can automate the process fully with a little coding.
2. Bit
Building monolithic apps means all your code is internal and is not useful anywhere else. It just serves this one project. And as you scale to more code and people, development becomes slow and painful as everyone works in one codebase and on the same version.
But what if you build independent components first, and then use them to build any number of projects? You could accelerate and scale modern development 10x.
OSS Tools like Bit offer a powerful developer experience for building independent components and composing modular applications. Many teams start by building their Design Systems or Micro Frontends, through independent components.
3. Carbon
I’m a team leader for a developer team. This means I occasionally do presentations, not only for the team but also for externals. These presentations often include some kind of code snippet and more.
Using Carbon, you can easily just paste your code into the tool and it will generate a nice image with formatting which you can use in your presentations.
4. Monday
When dealing with projects, it’s important to have a good workflow and overview of your project, sprint, and tasks! Monday is a great platform for project management.
Before Monday, we used Trello, and the switch to Monday has made us more aligned and productive as a team.
5. Browserstack
With so many devices, screen sizes, platforms etc, it’s hard to test all. Unless you have 50 different devices with different OS’s you can’t test on all.
Browserstack is an indispensable tool when it comes to testing your project on different devices, screen sizes, and platforms. By setting it up correctly, you can even automate the whole testing flow.
6. Litmus
Have you ever found yourself ripping out all your hair when doing HTML for newsletters? There are so many email clients and so many limitations to what you can do in emails, not to mention it’s hard to test.
By using Litmus you can test emails in different clients, much like browserstack, just for emails.
7. Favicon
If you have ever built websites, you know what a pain dealing with favicons can be. You need a lot of different icons for different devices.
With this tool, you can automate this so you don’t have to deal with it. Simply upload an image, and everything will be generated for you, including the HTML.
8. Webstorm
There is a lot of IDE´s out there. We have chosen to use Webstorm as it is one of the absolutely best javascript IDE´s on the market. In my team, we collaboratively decided we all should use the same IDE, and the winner was Webstorm.
We tried out many during the way, eg: Visual Studio Code, however, we found that Webstorm was the better choice for us. Using the same IDE across the team improved our productivity!
9. Sourcetree
Git is widely used throughout the developer community, but it can be hard to remember all commands you need in the terminal.
Also, you don’t get an easy overview of swimlanes, commits etc when using the terminal. Introducing Sourcetree. This is probably my favorite Git UI client. It has great UX which makes it so easy to use.
10. Codesandbox
Have you ever found yourself needing to prototype some code real quick? Codesandbox makes it easy to do this.
It allows you to do rapid, fast development which you can easily share with team members. For me and my team, this has been a great tool during the pandemic.
Build composable frontend and backend
Don’t build web monoliths. Use Bit to create and compose decoupled software components — in your favorite frameworks like React or Node. Build scalable and modular applications with a powerful and enjoyable dev experience.
Bring your team to Bit Cloud to host and collaborate on components together, and greatly speed up, scale, and standardize development as a team. Start with composable frontends like a Design System or Micro Frontends, or explore the composable backend. Give it a try →
