This article is a 2018 revised version of my original article https://coder.today/free-tools-for-any-developer-707761504f7f
Free tools ...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
My additions.
Online/cross-platform:
For Windows:
I've used both Insomnia and Postman and simply put, Insomnia is to Postman what VSCode is to Visual Studio.
Postman's power comes in its ability to do more advanced prototyping and API development stuff and "project" or collections of API calls that are exportable and sharable.
Insomnia, on the other hand, is more strictly for interfacing with existing APIs, and as a result doesn't really have feature parity with Postman, but that's not really a bad thing. Not everyone needs or wants the advanced features of Postman and just needs something to poke at an API with. For that, Insomnia works great.
Winmerge is great. BeyondCompare (scootersoftware.com/) is my go-to, however. Commercial, but worth the money. And cross-platform too!
Great list you created. Some of them I didn't know but I will give it a go :D
Gravit.io is definitely a great app that I use quite a few times when creating svgs or design mockups for a template.
Another great app is Dash unfortunately its only available for mac and ios. The app is meant to be your go to place for all documentation. You can add a bunch of them (python, javascript, bootstrap and much much more), what makes the app great is that you can use it offline so you can always check up on documentation.
Do you know Zeal ? It's multiplatform.
Thanks!
Dash look nice but how do you share that with your team? Especially the non-mac users. Most probably they have the same problems as you and vice versa.
Maybe something like gitlab code snippets with IDE plugins would work, I never tried it.
Yeah sharing with the team might be an issue, the documentation is downloaded into
~Library/Application Support/Dash/Docsetbut the file is a.docsetextension so maybe you would need to open it with some other program.Its a work around but very ugly one haha Perhaps devdoc plugin is a good idea as Giorgos suggested (i havent tried that one yet tho)
There is devdoc plug in for Chrome which is identical, and velocity for windows!
I use Blue light filter utilities like Flux on my laptop and Twilight on mobile.
Especially recommended for developers who spent lots of time in front of bright displays. It took some time for me to get used to these, but now I can't work at night if these filters are not on.
Apologies if I diverted from the intent of the post.
Nice, if you need to work at night maybe is a good addition to the toolbox.
I tried this technique on the tablet, when reading, and it felt wrong, I couldn't watch it for more then a few minutes.
Is true that the white light may interfere with your sleep, it will trick the brain that is daylight. To fix this I just stay away from the display at night :D.
Something I've been using for a little bit now is gravit.io, which is a browser based version of Inkscape/Gimp. I mostly enjoy the flexibility of their cloud storage.
Sorry to hear that, I haven't used it in a while. True their quality of service and katas is not the greatest but the "battle" feeling is great.
For more CS and Math problems I recommend leetcode.com, and for interviews interviewbit.com
Other more Gamified alternatives are codecombat.com/ and codingame.com/, also good for non-tech people that want to switch to a dev-related position and need something fun to do while learning. These two I recommend after scratch.mit.edu/
I forgot to add
Draw.io - Online free diagrams. I use it to explain things (like on the whiteboard), UML and Architecture diagrams, it has even the AWS/GCP icons.
(not so free) zoom.us It has a limited free tier, is like Skype/Hangouts but it has a special feature: a drawing whiteboard, which is great for collaboration talks.
Wanted to add Flatirons Fuse to the list. Flatirons Fuse is an embeddable CSV import tool that makes importing data to your website fast, easy, and painless.
This is so helpful! Thank you so much for sharing!
Glad I could help, I like to be more efficient and freebies, so I combined them.
I've used VS Code and I personally prefer it over Atom and Sublime.
Another awesome free tool you can use if you're on Windows is CMDER. It is a Windows command line interface that uses Linux commands (think ls for list files/directories instead of dir for Windows). Plus, you can have several consoles open at once (great if you're running a few node servers to test your projects).
All in all, thank you for sharing this amazing resource. I appreciate it.
Pavon
Pavon
Hey, thanks for your reply!
For windows there are more ways to install a "bash", with the Windows Subsytem or with Emulators like the one from git for windows.
I recommend to have as close as possible to bash emulator otherwise it will be a bigger difference between the env in which you code and the production one, which will lead to subtle problems along the way. Also bash and unix tools are very powerful, you can get away with writing code inside your app for simple mondene tasks.
Beware, VS code is open-source, but the binaries are far from it !
Source :carlchenet.com/you-think-the-visua...
Probably because of the IntelliSense "magic" library.
Thanks for pointing out!
Actually migrated to VSCodium a few minutes ago.
Thanks so much for this extremely comprehensive list! I'll definitely try out a few of these services.
As for the comments, I second GitKraken and Dash -- great tools! For time tracker, I prefer Clockify.me. It seems that it has more features than Toggl and it's free as well.
I'd also like to add codepen.io to this list, as it is a good place for prototyping.
I haven't included any Web development specific tool on purpose. That will be another post.
waiting for this specific post for web ❤️❤️
It's a hard one to make, it wouldn't fit in a book but I will try to focus on specific areas and needs. Most of the articles I found are for UI/UX, I will focus on the technical part.
Few more from me :)
Enjoy
A suggestion to add to the Class A list:
fakeJSON: A mock API for rapid development. Even comes with test data.
Thanks!
I think is too specific for this list, but I will add a similar one in my next related article specific for Web Developers.
Thanks for the list - great!
I’d also recommend Docker.com - most likely every app/system/platform/database/whatever... when you need it. You can use it e.g. for testing your code on different platforms, quick building temporary databases (or sometimes even the permanent ones ;) etc.
Very useful tool for me (development of plug-ins to Jira and Confluence).
Thanks!
I actually started a Docker series on my blog, any feedback is appreciated.
Although Docker is free and increased my productivity by a lot (especially for local dev setups of projects), as you can see my list is more user-friendly, and not so technical. I left it out deliberately, but now thinking about it maybe it was a mistake.
Nice list!
I used SourceTree before, but now I prefer Git Extensions.
As a note I don't have much experience in git GUIs, I only used it at the start of my career (10yrs) with SVN/Git Tortoise, and SourceTree a few years ago when doing non-web development on Mac.
But I had to train non-tech team members (GFX,QA) to use git and SourceTree was a good friendly way to achieve that.
For Developers I recommend using the BASH, this all mighty tool that fixes everything! Except for conflicts and few other heavy operations :).
Wow it was cool to see someone else finding nearly all the same tools so useful, discovered some new ones, too. Great list.
My addition to the list is Ora.pm which combine Trello and Toggl. Ora gives you detailed reports about where you spent your time. Also, you can focus on your current tasks without distraction.
I'm not familiar with it I'll check it out! But I have to add
Toggle is more then time tracking, its detecting your PC activity and pauses the timer when you are idle (I have accurate timings not just estimating and adding X hours like Jira has). It creates invoices for your clients if you do project-based work per hour. Can work as a desktop app or browser plugin.
Toggle has time tracking and other plugins, but not so free (only 1 free addon per space I think).
Yeah, Toggl is a great product. I really like it. Ora has plans for desktop time tracking with auto pause timer and report which app you are using.
Great list! I would add mocky.io/ to that list. When you quickly need to add mock endpoints that return a response. Great for testing my front end.
Thank you, I really like it and use it quite a bit lately
Hi, here is a website that list all free resources for developer
freestuff.dev/
Alternative to Canva is Adobe Spark Post!🎉