A little cheat here, and there never hurt anybody and wasn’t only helpful with “The Legend of Zelda” back in the days. Even developers need some assistance from time to time to boost their productivity or to solve particular problems. And that you are reading this article already shows a lot about you as a developer: you take your craft seriously. Sure, especially experience and training make you better, but these tools we want to introduce to you as well. You might not even have heard of them! Every month there are countless new tools on the market, so it’s tough to stay in the loop.
Here are our favorites, to prevent you from drowning in the Tool-Pool:
Image Credit: Trello.com
We wouldn’t be hy if we didn’t introduce you Trello. It’s very likely you’ve already heard a lot about this tool and might already use it on the regular. If not: Where the hell have you been? With the help of Trello, it’s so easy to have an overview of your project, and it’s development. It consists of Lists that can be added and shifted to Boards. Even if your team is using a more heavy duty tool like Jira, Trello can be useful, to keep track of your workload, learning goals or side projects. If it’s still unclear to you, how to use Trello: find some public Boards, here for some inspiration.
Image Credit: Codementor.io
Challenges are a great way to train yourself and to become a better developer. It’s the same with artists and their quick sketches, juggling for football players and improvising for a pianist - it keeps us “warm” and stipulates your foundational skills. Code Wars offers hundreds of challenges that are classified by complexity factor. The cool thing about Code Wars is, that, after you finished the problem, you can see the solutions of others with the highest rating.
If brains could get bigger with every new information you get, developers would have a severe monster brain. But luckily there’s Evernote to relieve your monster brain. With this tool, you can save articles, shortcuts, ideas and what else comes to your mind in your day to day life, and review it another time. Everything is kept in a cloud, so you have access to your second brain whenever you need it!
Image Credit: Giphy.com
Simply said: CodePen is an excellent platform for frontend developers with an even greater community that allows you to share code, get feedback and inspiration. CodePen also helps with getting work as a freelancer, as your profile can serve as a portfolio.
Image Credit: Code Pen
Super easy, super cool, super fresh - Sip. Sounds like a new lemonade, but it is a tool to “steal” colors from anywhere in formats like hex and RGB.
Image Credit: Sipapp.io
An easy and free (yey) tool to test your website for speed and performance. It tells you which aspects need bettering and gives them a rating.
“Built with” is a great tool to see which technology is used to build the website you are interested in. Life can be so easy!
Image Credit: Giphy.com
Code Climate is an automated tool for GitHub and GitHub Enterprise to analyze your code. As a developer, you can already “smell” a foul code. But Code Climate can tell you exactly where it smells and how you can get rid of the mold. It rates your app after usability, style, security and more. It’s free for the first two weeks after it’s 700€ a month for a team of 25 people.
Image Credit: dandemeyere.com
Image Credit: Amazon.de
Small but powerful! This single-board computer is the size of a credit card, only costs 40€ and can do so many cool and fun things! It makes you use your developer skills which you have to combine with the electronic components.
These are a few cool things you can do with the Raspberry Pi.
“If this then what” is a service, that allows you to let your apps talk to your devices. If you want to get out of a boring conversation, you can trigger a fake call with a simple SMS. You can automatically light the way for the pizza delivery guy or let Google Home find your phone. There are so many recipes to use IFTTT, so have fun with it and let it make your life a bit easier!
Which tools do you use daily?
Next up: The best communities for developers. Stay tuned!
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