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Cover image for What's a new thing you've started using recently?

What's a new thing you've started using recently?

Ben Halpern on March 23, 2022

New programming language, productivity app, whatever.

What is new to you, and why did you start using it?

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GrahamTheDev • Edited

gather.town/ - it is a virtual office webapp and it is such a fun way to work in a remote team.

You have a pixel art office that you walk around and objects you can interact with.

You have rooms and spaces that when you enter them you can interact with other people in that space and you automatically get connected via a video call within the application.

You can even decorate your desk, although it can lead to "escalation" as happened with us....

Things escalated quickly!

I "came into the office" yesterday and people had started decorating their desks!
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I am a competitive so and so, I had to make my desk awesome and create a custom desktop background with the daily.dev logo on!
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I woke up this morning and the design team fired back with an amazing zen garden space!
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But as I said, I am competitive so....
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I hate to think what I will wake up to tomorrow 🤣

If you work in a remote team, it is a great way to get that "office feeling" while working remotely!

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fjones profile image
FJones

Oh god, that looks like the perfect way to kill productivity in just the right ways. I might toy with that a bit!

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GrahamTheDev • Edited

Haha, true!

To be fair, it took maybe 15 minutes to design my desk and maybe 30 minutes to create a custom overlay from an image.

I can imagine that you could definitely spend hours on building a space, but overall it is a really good way of running a remote team and quite efficient with the jumping into meetings by simply "walking" a few steps rather than finding email invites, checking your camera settings etc!

Hope you have fun with it and let me know if you end up using it for anything (fun or professional!)

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leob profile image
leob

Lol reminds me a little bit of ... Microsoft Bob! but I expect it's better than that ;)

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GrahamTheDev

OK so now I have to go look up Microsoft Bob! 🤣

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leob profile image
leob

There you go: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

Is it a carbon copy/spitting image, or not?

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

Brilliant! It is funny how things come full circle isn't it!

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leob profile image
leob

That's what I thought haha

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Ashwin Hariharan

Oh wow, this looks like the Pokemon Emerald game I used to play long ago on the Nintendo Gameboy Advance! I spent countless hours on it. 😆

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GrahamTheDev

That was how I described it to my fiancé, then she said she never played Pokemon...so it was a terrible explanation 🤣

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Alexandre Alencar

That's gorgeous!

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GrahamTheDev

I love the art style they picked for the components!

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Anish De

Lol, this is epic!

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dinerdas profile image
Diner Das

I've started using Remix — a breath of fresh air in web development.

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t0nghe profile image
Tonghe Wang

Holy smokes! This thing looks fun.

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Isaac Lyman

I've started using Obsidian to take notes and write on the go. I even wrote a plugin for it. I'm not a power user by any means, but having Markdown files that sync to all my devices without the friction of visiting a website and logging in is proving to be a game changer.

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𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️ • Edited

Obsidian is pretty awesome; I've been using it to keep the occasional notes but also to write my blog posts (which I actually built an SSG for just last week)

I also started using it for work when I have to find my way into a new project, but for obvious reasons I can't share any of those notes here 😅

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ratcat profile image
RatCat • Edited

i have started to learn tailwind css :
Here is the sample site i have done so far.
cutt.ly/oSGLZ0p

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t0nghe profile image
Tonghe Wang

Yo bruv! Great work. Looks beautiful!

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ratcat profile image
RatCat

thanx a lot

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Jonatandb

Nice! Are you doing a paid course or just looking the official documentation?

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ratcat profile image
RatCat

@jonatandb thanks !
i just go with official documentation and when i stuck to understand the documentation, i tried random youtube video on demand.

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jonatandb profile image
Jonatandb

Awesome! I'm thinking to learn it too.

Good job, lots of luck! 💪🏻😎

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ratcat profile image
RatCat

surely ! its amazing.
I have a plan to upload more things based on tailwind.

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ratcat profile image
RatCat

surely ! its amazing.
I have a plan to upload more things based on tailwind.

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jonatandb profile image
Jonatandb

Great, so I will check your Github profile again when I start to learn it 😉

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Tina Huynh

I started my bullet journal. Though I am still figuring out my preferred layout, it has definitely helped me with keeping track of my daily and weekly tasks. Libraries are also now my favorite place to study and get work done. Programming in a quiet place is so relaxing especially with some instrumental music playing. I'm starting to use Material Design and learn TypeScript as well! Always studying, always learning :D

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t0nghe profile image
Tonghe Wang

Been bullet journaling for a while. Love it very much. It makes me more productive and more connected (if that's the right word) with myself.

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Tina Huynh

Yeah! It really helps me organize my thoughts and see my progress (or even my lack of) throughout the weeks to help me define the areas I can improve on in the future

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Toni Engelhardt

I've been working on a minimalistic bullet journaling app since a while, maybe you guys wanna check it out: journalisticapp.com

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Tina Huynh

I had put the concept on my project list. How beautiful

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Toni Engelhardt • Edited

Thanks! If you have any feedback I'd love to hear it!

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Adrien de Peretti

medusajs to create an e-commerce platform, for which I ended up creating a custom Framework/wrapper around called medusa-extender 🚀🎉

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Ashwin Hariharan

I started using an iPad, with the following apps:

  1. Coursera for learning 🎓
  2. Goodnotes for taking notes for my coursework ✍️. The cool part is, i can open Coursera and Goodnotes simultaneously on my iPad, and start taking notes with my Apple Pencil as I watch and listen to the videos. The experience is surprisingly good.
  3. GarageBand for MiDi connection with my keyboard for some music practice. 🎹
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Donnell Wyche

I've just started learning the Tailwind Alpine Livewire Laravel (TALL) stack to build my next SaaS, CareNote. I've also been playing around with Meilisearch and Soketi, which are really cool tech.

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alizulfaqar profile image
Ali Zulfaqar

Hello there, just want to ask if there is any difference between current websocket and soketi? I'm new in this area would like some clarification if possible. Thanks!!

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Donnell Wyche

soketi is a websocket server just like pusher. soketi.app is a drop-in replacement for pusher. pusher costs $49/month vs a digital ocean droplet for $5, which is plenty fast to soketi.

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alizulfaqar profile image
Ali Zulfaqar

Is it the same as socket.io/ ?

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donnell profile image
Donnell Wyche

Yes, socket.io is built on top of the websocket protocols. soketi.app is a self-hosted, open-source websockets server.

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Bobby Iliev

Materialize! It is a streaming database that takes data coming from different sources like Kafka, PostgreSQL, S3 buckets, and more and allows users to write views that aggregate/materialize that data and let you query those views using pure SQL with very low latency.

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Bobby Iliev

Here is a quick introduction video:

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alizulfaqar profile image
Ali Zulfaqar • Edited

Looks great, do you mind sharing the condition to use this database ? Do you recommend it ?

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Bobby Iliev

Yes I strongly recommend it.

To start experimenting with it, you can run it directly on your laptop as described here:

materialize.com/docs/get-started/

Or you could sign up for a free cloud account here:

materialize.com/materialize-cloud-...

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alizulfaqar profile image
Ali Zulfaqar

Thank you friend, sorry for the late reply

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bobbyiliev profile image
Bobby Iliev

No problem at all! Hope you find it useful!

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alizulfaqar profile image
Ali Zulfaqar

Just want to ask for your opinion, does it have the same purpose as like InfluxDB or TimeScaleDB ?

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Jira15

ADHD Medication, started 2 weeks ago, i just can say its been a life changer and saver

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martibravo

I started last year after being undiagnosed for 20 years, and it has been a life changer for me too.

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Domi • Edited

Dbux - a fully visual/interactive debugger for JavaScript. A lot less guessing, much more interactive and less frustrating investigation experience.

If you want a personal tour (if you are interested at all), let me know.

(Self promotion Ok?)

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Michael Tharrington

Might be jumping the gun here as I haven't really built anything with it, but I plan to soon and I think it's a cool tool worth mentioning — Navattic.

The site describes it as such:

Instantly build, customize and share interactive product demos that convert.

And that's spot on! I'd love to use it to create walkthroughs for how to do some things right here on DEV!

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Bruce Axtens

Tealfeed, "a global community of knowledge seekers who want to share their knowledge and learn from the experiences of others."
I belong to a few of these. Someone saw what I was writing on dev.to and invited me to write for tealfeed. I'm an old man with "opinions". Let's see how long I survive.

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Kaushal Joshi

I have been doing a lot recently but here's a glance:
Personal front:

  • Next.js
  • Technical writing

Internship:

  • Cypress
  • D3.js
  • GitHub APIs, CI/CD, GitHub Actions

Productivity tools:

  • trying to integrate notetaking with obsidian

And working on a project for a national level Hackathon :)

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Erik Lundevall Zara

Two things that are relatively new:

  • CUE (Configure Unity Execute). A configuration language with many interesting properties, can integrate with JSON/YAML/OpenAPI/protobuf and Go code. cuelang.org

  • Nix. Interesting approach to repeatable and reproducible builds and deployments. nixos.org

I am looking at these to find potential productivity improvements in terms of managing configurations, environments, builds and deployments.

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Kanishka

You might take interest in gitpod

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Erik Lundevall Zara

Yes, that is on my list already :-)

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Kanishka

I tried it briefly today with golang cli on gitlab. It was very quick to get started. Gitlab even has a "gitpod" button.

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Hamilton Greene

I've started using Svelte for frontend.

I used React and NextJS for the past few years and generally liked it - a really solid development and production experience. In the past few months I started seeing people raving about Svelte in their side projects (a lot of those posts were here on DEV!).

I looked into it and was amazed at how simple it looked. It was very easy to understand and removed a lot of the boilerplate code / gotchas I kept running into in React (esp. with data handling and hooks). After playing around with it for a few days, I started migrating my projects over and haven't looked back!

I'm now using Svelte and Sveltekit (even though it's not out of beta!) and have been enjoying the benefits.

I wrote Svelte is better than React with more of my thoughts on the comparisons and why I made the jump.

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Kristian Quirapas

cron jobs just to say hello world every 12pm

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Matthew Daly

Fig, after a recommendation from someone I used to work with. It's made the terminal on my work Mac a much better environment.

I do wish it had support for Lando, but from the documentation it sounds easy to write your own definitions in Typescript.

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Chad Adams • Edited

Beekeeper studio - Open source SQL editor/Database manager
Caught my attention because it was open-source, cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux), visually appealing, works with numerous databases (MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server, SQLite etc). Thought I'd give it a try and I'm loving it so far.

Docker-mailserver
I was looking for a simple mail server that runs in docker and has low RAM consumption.

Prisma.io
The database migration feature drew my attention. Making database changes is way easier now. I like Prisma so far but the only thing I don't like is Prisma doesn't work on armv8 (Raspberry PI 4). I wanted to setup CI/CD pipeline on my raspberry pi for a testing environment but wasn't able to because of Prisma since it's not supported.

Windows WSL
I love this because I'm basically coding on Linux but using Windows. 🙂 Also when I play games I don't have to switch computers, or dual boot like I used to. WSL has been a huge productivity boost for me.

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Lucas André

Tailwind CSS, is friking awesome.

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Kanishka

It's not my expertise, but you may find stitches.dev interesting later

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Parker Waiters

I signed up for Wasm Builders 🙂

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Bernd Wechner

Installed umami to monitor my websites.

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Samuel Chan

taskwarrior.org/

I love it so much I even built a python package tool for it called TaskQuant (<7kb, incredibly lightweight and fast).

pip install taskquant
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

It's a way to gamify todo a little more, by producing a scorecard on your "productivity" level over the days.

How did it get to 6.8kb? By using vanilla python. Numpy and Pandas alone are 250mb. With matplotlib and Scipy it gets to 508mb. So doing everything without dependencies does have its payoff! I made a video showing how exactly that's done!

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𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️

Taskwarrior is indeed a pretty awesome tool.

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acode123

I've started using Nuxt, a great javascript framework! Oh yea, I also wrote a article last week explaining why I dont use javascript frameworks :)

Stuff change!

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alizulfaqar profile image
Ali Zulfaqar

You are writing pure JavaScript code now?

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acode123

With the help of a few JavaScript libraries! :)

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Harvey Thompson

I use org in general, mostly as a todo-task-notes list. Because it's just a text file, I check one in for each project in Git. Tasks are versioned!

The thing I love though is embedding any script in the org text file, with results, building pipelines using shell, python or whatever, then finally building an org table.

Recently set up magit-forge, amazingly easy and so fast to do Git and GitHub from Emacs.

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Anish De

I have recently (about 1-2 weeks) started using Slapdash and I even wrote some custom commands for Slapdash (mainly to search through documentation for large projects and some utility commands, more coming soon!).

Here is an example -
Tailwind CSS Docsearch Example

Also swtiched to Neovim back in the start of February.

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Fernando

Kde Desktop. There are a lot of plasmoids and the UI is so beautiful and customizable.

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Rajesh

I have started to use Jib and Skaffold , two very good plugin to build container based applications.

Blogs on how it can be used to enhance the developer experience
Jib and how to use it
Skaffold for kubernetes native development

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૮༼⚆︿⚆༽つ

Go generic 🦫

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𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️

I started using ActivityWatch last week; it's a great tool to collect data on what I spend time on, both at work and at home.

In terms of motivation, getting a neat graph showing you that you spent 2 hours scrolling through reddit just hits differently.

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Eelco Verbrugge

I wrote my first Unit Test in Symfony. It just tested if the outcome was a positive or negative number. Will dive into it more shortly and write a blog about it

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AquaDrehz

I'm using Hotwire and Tailwind. Kinda new for me. Just a poc project but still impress me a lot

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Tiffany Rossi

pen & paper :)
turns out writing a reference notebook for things i'm learning works pretty well for me - since i wrote it, i know whats's there, along with my thoughts and ideas about the topics.

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Brian Kirkpatrick

I've been making significant use of git submodules lately. It took a little effort to get a good workflow and understand how to use it effectively without messing things up. But used correctly, it can be a wonderful, language-agnostic tool that can effectively replace traditional package managers. Great stuff.

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Klaudia Jaszczak

I’ve started using app.diagrams.net/ to create various diagrams.
Diagrams help me better understand the problem and visualize what I want to achieve. 🤓

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Ashwin Hariharan

Wow, thanks for the recommendation Leonid, will check it out!

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Oscar Rodriguez

Doxygen - is the de facto standard tool for generating documentation from annotated C++ sources - I'm using it to understand better class relationships in the chromium source code.

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Federico Roman

I start to look into remix, seems interesting ;)

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Stephen De Gabrielle

The Racket Programming Language.
It is really quick and easy to create GUI apps, compiled and all.
Haven't tried the web server or RacketScript (racket on javascript) yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

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Dominik

github.com/kabinspace/AstroVim - I've started learning vim and try to replace VSCode with it.

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Liviu Lupei

I'm now personally using Endtest for testing our new website.
Learning a lot from this experience.

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martibravo

Deno! It has such a great developer experience and nearly all NPM packages can be used thanks to skypack.

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Andrea Pavoni

2 years using logic, I didn’t know I can write JS, that’s amazing! Thanks, I’m going to dig more info

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enesstr

Django Rest Framework

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Kanishka

I have been searching online to try to find industry adoption figures for django rest and rails api, relative to flask et al. I haven't been successful yet in finding any facts or opinions.

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Felipe Chang

ArangoDB for a side project

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Thomas Bnt

SASS 🥰🚀🚀 (Yep again, but after a few years of not using it, I realize the stupidity)

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Thatha-Madhavi • Edited

Started Java Coding

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Jamie Langskov

Airtable and Luma have both been invaluable in my recent work. I love learning on the job and these lightweight tools have been easy to pick up and experiment with 🥰

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Ali Zulfaqar • Edited

Been trying out supabase.io/ as an alternative to firebase

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Daniele Sabre

notion.so, I knew It from a post on dev.to and now i can't stay without It! I use for everithing of my life, from to-do tasks to videogames notes and naturally for work! Give it a try 😉

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Aaron K Saunders

testing-library.com/docs/react-tes... have been aware of it but had never implemented it in a large project

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Danish Saleem

Learning SQL

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Kanishka

Started learning rails for API development. I am curious about batteries included frameworks, after going minimalist, typed for a long time.

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Murtuzaali Surti

Eleventy! Made a blog using eleventy!
syntackle.vercel.app

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ShatilKhan

I started using linkcleaner app, it's a web app, helps me make links shorter so I can use it in various resume forms.

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Andrew Baisden

Cypress for doing End-To-End testing.

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jzombie

Jest mocks

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Alain D'Ettorre

Not using, but learning: Rust and Go.

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Jonathan Apodaca

I'm trying to learn/use Nix, but documentation is truly terrible for it.

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Toni Engelhardt

Nuxt 3, the DX is on another level (still in beta though)

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Paul Planchon

AWS lambda with the serverless framework. Its fucking amazing.

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Kishore kunal

I've started Doing a code challenge to solve 450 questions and posting daily about it as I move forward .

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Braincuber Technologies

I started sharing my knowledge through blog in dev.to