Ben Halpern
Posted on • Updated on
What's your favorite tool or library that few others have heard of?
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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 “what 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/
Crontab.guru is a really good one.
Whoa, Varvy looks pretty sweet!
Vimium (vimium.github.io/) - chrome extension for navigating the web w/o a mouse.
I prefer cVim, I found it faster for link annotation rendering :) but both are awesome utils for mouseless interaction.
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.
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.
WakaTime for tracking how much time I actually code.
ooooo cool. i'm going to try this.
Maybe not that uncommon, but GLM for any and all 3D maths in C++. It's lightweight, simple and fast.
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/
screenhero is the shit, i use it almost every day
Sure, just send me your email address. You could either use Twitter DM or use my email off my GitHub profile.
Listary, pretty much adding a quick launcher and a number of Folder History functionalities to Windows.
github.com/alecthomas/ondir
Small bash lib to easily register commands when cd'ing into a directory, such as setting the terminal's title :-)
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)
I've been using Hapi.js for all my recent projects. Been liking it since. Haven't looked into Swagger, but sounds pretty sweet!
github.com/wting/autojump — a tool that allows you to shorten your
cdpaths.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.
A tool I've used extensively on some old legacy sites I maintained to encode HTML entities visually. mothereff.in/html-entities
VRTK for getting your Unity VR projects up and running fast.
vrtoolkit.readme.io/
Tabli - A Free, Powerful Tab Manager Extension for Google Chrome: gettabli.com
This is a Shameless Plug (I wrote Tabli). But I wrote it because, as a developer, I really needed it, and now it's a tool I can't live without. And, much to my chagrin, few others have heard of it. :)
Tabli's best feature is the ability to save collections of tabs as a "Saved Window" and easily restore that saved state. This is invaluable when using the web as a source of reference material; the "quick tour" video on the web site shows how this works for (for example) CSS reference docs.
Tabli's other killer feature is the Tabli popout window. This provides a quick at-a-glance real-time updating view of all the windows and tabs you currently have open in Chrome, essential on the giant 4K+ monitors many of us use nowadays.
Finally, Tabli has extensive keyboard shortcuts so you can accomplish most navigation tasks without your fingers ever leaving the keyboard.
Hope you find Tabli useful as a developer tool -- feedback always welcome!
Deepstream is a great open source alternative to services like Firebase with far more extensibility and ease of use.
Paws for Trello integrates Trello with macOS and gives a native-feeling experience (even though it's still an Electron application).
devRant is a great place to go when looking for programmer jokes or feeling the need to rant about something.
I tried Deepstream in a production app.
Nothing but regret all over the place. I don't think it's production-ready yet.
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