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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

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What's your favorite tool or library that few others have heard of?

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Mike 🀘

Instead of harping on a popular framework, I want to highlight some niche web-based tools I find myself going back to far too often. It's usually for things I don’t do often enough or when I get stuck on a particularly niche aspect of something.

Crontab time formatter: crontab.guru/
CSS entity conversion calculator: evotech.net/articles/testjsentitie...
Regex tool: regexr.com/
Testing website readiness: varvy.com/ (previously feedthebot.com)
The β€œwhat the hell does this command do?” for command line: explainshell.com/
htaccess tester: htaccess.madewithlove.be/
Free online lossless image compressor: kraken.io/
Parse your css (for fun?): cssstats.com/
Collect a user’s browser info: yourbrowser.is/

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Michael Lee πŸ•

Crontab.guru is a really good one.

Whoa, Varvy looks pretty sweet!

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ross profile image
Ross Creighton

Vimium (vimium.github.io/) - chrome extension for navigating the web w/o a mouse.

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jorgecedi

I prefer cVim, I found it faster for link annotation rendering :) but both are awesome utils for mouseless interaction.

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Casen

NuclearJS

It's popularity is dwarfed by redux and other flux libraries used in conjunction with React, but I find it absolutely flawless. I have nothing but good things to say about it. If you're planning on build a large, complex React app, do give it a try.

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Ben Halpern

Awesome. The dev.to client is completely vanilla JS and I'm casually shopping around for the future. It's always great to find more options for comparison when you're not in a hurry to implement.

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Gonzalo

WakaTime for tracking how much time I actually code.

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ross profile image
Ross Creighton

ooooo cool. i'm going to try this.

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Alistair

Maybe not that uncommon, but GLM for any and all 3D maths in C++. It's lightweight, simple and fast.

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Charles Reace

Not sure how well-known it is, but I quite like ScreenHero for remote pair programming. (I guess they've recently joined Slack, so probably are gaining visibility?)

screenhero.com/

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Bent Cardan

screenhero is the shit, i use it almost every day

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tbodt

Sure, just send me your email address. You could either use Twitter DM or use my email off my GitHub profile.

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Santiago Palladino

github.com/alecthomas/ondir

Small bash lib to easily register commands when cd'ing into a directory, such as setting the terminal's title :-)

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Kris Siegel

I have a few that I find handy.

tohtml.com/
Take code samples and generate highlighted HTML for blog entries and documentation

hapijs.com/
Hapi.js is a great alternative to express.js for creating web servers in node. Using this with joi.js and Swagger means you can write your endpoints once, supply the code for validation and swagger reads all of this in and generates documentation. Never have stale comments again!

purecss.io/
Pure CSS is a super, super small CSS library that helps you do a lot of what Bootstrap does just more bare bones. It's run my Yahoo and hasn't been frequently updated but they're working on turning it over to the community. Great little library that's 3.8kb when gzipped.

msngrjs.com/
A JavaScript messaging library that includes handy utilities for type validation (#ShamelessPlug, this is my library)

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Michael Lee πŸ•

I've been using Hapi.js for all my recent projects. Been liking it since. Haven't looked into Swagger, but sounds pretty sweet!

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Arseniy ✌️ Ivanov

github.com/wting/autojump β€”Β a tool that allows you to shorten your cd paths.

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Tim Birkett

I'm a fan of Goss - github.com/aelsabbahy/goss for server validation and use it in my provisioning and monitoring tools.

Jenkins Job Builder - docs.openstack.org/infra/jenkins-j... is an absolute must have for sensible Jenkins management.

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