Working as a software developer no longer coding all day, also require lots of time to architect, design, test, deployment.
New or experienced developer, in both cases, the most important work ethic should be, “work smarter not harder”.
It takes large amount of time in various development tasks, top on that, simple mislead/mistake can lead to an astronomical amount of loss in production.
In this jungle of dev tools, a developer has to be really careful about the toolset he/she is using. Sometimes it is a overwhelming and confusing process.
It is crucial to know available tools that can help in this day to day tasks and help developers to work smarter. Today I am going to demonstrate some of these tools I am using day to task for saving time and risk for my projects.
Bundlephobia
Modern node base development is everywhere now this day. After nodeJs, Javascript getting really interesting and modern. Any web development project needs some npm packages to save time and hassle on the long run. Bundlephobia simply analyze the npm package and give useful information about package.
Which is really great and recommended before including any npm package inside the project. It is 100% free.
CloudCraft
This is a special tool for project architect and planning. More focused on AWS but also provide azure and other reports too. I have used this tool for analyzing the budget for any server/hosting situation. And a big plus is the simplest drag and drop UI with smooth UX. Really a useful tool for cloud architecture, budgeting, and presentation.
Figma
This tools belong to the design team. Adobe illustrator user can find this tool quite friendly and the most awesome part is it has a web-based platform that will help a lot. Collaborate with dev team will also easy, Figma will give any CSS rules directly accessible for developers. It is also a free tool that has an extra feature for a subscription. I personally like simplicity and a pretty fast web-based solution.
Fontflipper
Choosing the right font for design is really important. It is a tough designing job to choose a purposeful and correct font for application or website. Usually, for manual work, it takes a long time to choose correct font and sometimes font does not look good when the whole template has done. In that case, Fontflipper can really help. Users can choose a different font and see the exact implementation output. Then based on a positive user rating, users can directly download fonts from google. It also has a tinder-like swipe feature for like or dislikes a font.
Visbug
Visbug is a chrome extension for analyzing web applications/websites. Really useful tools for testing and analyzing. It basically works as dev tools available in chrome, but it has lots more usability and uses cases. This tool has a short learning curve, but I am going to assure that, this is 100% worth of time if you are a web dev.
https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/ProjectVisBug
Insomnia
Insomnia will let backend developers sleep more peacefully. It is an API debugging tool with amazing linear workflow and modern UI.
Either creating and REST API or GraphQL API these tools will save a ton of time, a developer can save reusable values and use them all over the project.
Synk
Synk basically a npm module analyzer, which extensively focuses on security and vulnerability of packages. It can be used as another global npm package or its online tools. I use this tool, especially before production, deploy to make sure any security issue is there or not.