Productivity Boosters: My Top Five Developer Tools Worth The Money

Thomas Scott — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 06:33:31 +0000

They say the best things in life are free, but when it comes to software... well, it’s not always true. Don't get me wrong - there are plenty of excellent free, open source tools I use daily. But tools that help you develop faster or more efficiently can easily pay for themselves in terms of time saved, because, as they also say, time is money.

I rounded up a list of the tools that I think are worth paying for and I hope you will find it useful. They all have a decent free plan or trial version available, so you can always kick the tires before you break the bank 💰

GitLive

GitLive is my team’s most recent discovery. It’s a peer-to-peer code streaming platform and IDE UI extensions (for VS Code and JetBrains) that enhance Git with real-time features such as online presence for team members and instant merge conflict detection.

Online presence for team members. The IDE plugin adds a team sidebar/tool window where you can see who in your team is online, what issues and branches they are working on and the changes they’ve made on those branches. This is great for remote teams and really helps when you want to view or share work in progress without resorting to a screen share or cut and pasting snippets of code into Slack or Teams.

Instant merge conflict detection. Indicators in the gutter of your editor show the difference between your changes and the changes of others. These update in real-time as you and your teammates are editing and provide an early warning of potential merge conflicts. They are a great way to get upfront insight into the potentially overlapping work of your colleagues without interruption.

✅ Free plan. Includes:

Unlimited users
Social coding and issue tracking
Merge conflict detection on fetch/pull
One-to-one calls with codeshare
40-min call duration limit

💲 Pro plan (10$/user/month or free for Open Source). Includes:

Everything from the free plan
Instant merge conflict detection
Group calls (coming soon)
4-hour call duration limit
Priority support

Wallaby.js

Wallaby is an integrated continuous testing tool for JavaScript, developed by the team behind Quokka and Dingo (fun fact: they name all their products after native Australian animals 🇦🇺)

This distraction-free javascript testing runs the tests as you type and provides the results directly in your editor, right next to your code (unlike traditional test runners that display feedback in your console), even on unsaved files.

Wallaby works really well on bigger projects where it can help you maximize your productivity by allowing you to focus on a specific set of tests, no matter how large your project becomes.

The tools come with a lot of great features like time travel debugger with edit-and-continue or value explorer and output inspector for viewing runtime values, to name just a few. Plus their docs are amazing and provide you with a vast overview of all the functionality that can really make you kick it off with the product in no time!

✅ 2-week free trial

💲 Licence required after two weeks
The regular price is 200$/user/year, but there are plenty of discounts that you can apply for (for example 40% for startups and non-profit, 10% for teams +20 ). Free for OSS.

Code Time

If you’re anything like me, you surely appreciate a good data visualisation of how you spent your time during coding. Personally, analyzing the graphs helps me improve my time management and better organize my work - that’s why I love time tracking tools, I use them for my personal projects and encourage my team to use one as well. Recently we’ve been experimenting with Code Time 🕰

Code Time is an Open Source plugin for automatic programming metrics and time tracking in Visual Studio Code on JetBrains. Its advanced features can provide you detailed feedback on how productive you are at work (a big plus for a slick design!).

It has a lot of cool features that help you minimise distractions, find out your most productive time of the day and break down your coding stats (code time by project, lines of code and keystrokes.) With Teams plan, you can defend code time, see the impact of meetings, and improve work-life balance across your entire team, while your data is always private - when you create a team, you will only see aggregated and anonymized summary data at the team level—available to everyone on that team. In addition, to protect individual privacy, the minimum team size is five members.

✅ Free plan. Includes:

Fast setup in less than five minute
Key DevOps performance metrics
90-day data retention

💲 Pro plan (20$/user/month or free for Open Source). Includes:

Everything in the free plan
Unlimited data retention
Custom dashboards
Automated email reporting
Monitors and alerts
EditorOps workflow automation (coming soon)

Tabnine

Most of the dev teams are constantly looking for solutions that will boost their productivity. One of the ways to increase the efficiency of developers (and decrease frustration) is faster coding. If you are among those who are always on a hunt for tools to speed up the coding Tabnine should definitely be on your radar.

It is an AI code completion tool that indexes your code and finds statistical patterns to create customized suggestions based on how you write your own code. It allows you to code faster with fewer syntax errors and more code snippets to look into right in your IDE. The best bit is that it gets better with time as it gains more material to learn from, which brings enormous value for dev teams (as we use the same project-specific modules, APIs, code patterns and conventions, whatever the AI learns from each one of the team members is very likely useful for the rest of the team when working in the same context) 🚀

✅ Free plan. Includes:

1 user
Completions based on Public Code

💲 Pro plan (12$/user/month or free for Open Source). Includes:

1-50 users
Completions based on Your Code
Advanced Completions based on Public Code
Insights & Analytics
Customization Options
Priority Support

JetBrains IDEs

For each his own, but I couldn’t really leave it out, could I? There is no need to present them to any developer, the JetBrains IDEs are widely used for professional development.

JetBrains IDEs come with a lot of “out-of-the-box” functionality dedicated to a specific language. They are also known for their great code refactoring possibilities and code analysis functionalities. Except for IDEA Community and Android Studio the IDEs cost money, but if you consider the amount of work you have to put into configuring other products, the price seems reasonable.

✅ 30-day free trial

💲 Licence required after 30 days
To start with, most of their IDEs cost 199$ per user year, excluding WebStorm which is cheaper (129$) and ReSharper(299$) and Rider(349$) that are more expensive. The price goes down significantly after the second and third year of using the product.

Time is money, and when it comes to software development then well, there is no doubt about that! I hope you will find my choice of paid developer tools worth checking out and after weighing the benefits they provide you’ll agree that spending money on quality tools is worth the cost.

5 Simple Productivity Tips For Developers

Thomas Scott — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 20:29:44 +0000

Being as productive as possible is a goal of every developer. Why? Well, the list of benefits is long and includes your own well-being and work satisfaction. The tips I prepared for you today are well known, but people (myself included) tend to forget or disregard them as "too simple". And that's a mistake because as we all know, simple is often the best!

Work fewer hours

It may seem illogical, but working fewer hours per week can improve your productivity. Having less time makes you focus on the tasks you have to finish and makes you dedicate your entire attention to those specific tasks instead of wasting time on distractions. This leads us to the second point:

Minimize distractions

"Getting in the zone" is not easy, but once you do, doesn't it feel great? In order to achieve this state of mind as often as possible, you should try to avoid distractions in your workplace during working hours. Keep your environment clean and silent and the most important one - turn off Facebook and Instagram, they are the worst time eaters!

Take breaks

Step away from your computer every hour and move your body.
You don't have to incorporate a full fitness routine into your working day (although that's strongly recommended), even a short walk around the house or a few stretches can make all the difference. Don't forget to reset your mind too - while you're away from the keyboard think about something different than work - your brain will thank you for every break like this!

Get proper sleep

You should never sacrifice your nighttime rest - it is during the night when your brain and your body get time to regenerate (even if you're a night owl, try to get 7-8 hours of sleep every day). We all hate deadlines, but sometimes it makes much more sense to go to bed and resume work the next day rather than spend over 12 hours in front of the monitor - you rarely get productive doing so and the quality of your work probably won't be the best.

Cherish your weekends

Are you guilty of "bringing your work home" or dedicating a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon "to get things done?" While it may seem like a good temporary solution when you are overwhelmed with work in the long run it may cause a lot of damage. Not allowing yourself time off will sooner or later influence not only your work but other aspects of life as well. Use your weekends to spend time with your friends and family, practice a new hobby, read a book that's been waiting on a shelf forever or go hiking. You will definitely notice that on Monday morning you feel refreshed, full of energy and ready to rock!

I hope these 5 simple ways to become more productive will help you put an end to bad practices and remind you that good work work-life balance is a key to being productive and avoiding burnout.

DEV Community: Thomas Scott

Productivity Boosters: My Top Five Developer Tools Worth The Money

GitLive

Wallaby.js

Code Time

Tabnine

JetBrains IDEs

5 Simple Productivity Tips For Developers

Work fewer hours

Minimize distractions

Take breaks

Get proper sleep

Cherish your weekends