I Built a Developer Productivity Tool!

#productivity #sideprojects #showdev

Hey everyone!

After many failed interviews absolutely nuked my self-confidence and love for programming, I decided I didn't really like the idea of working for someone else on their product. It's not that I never would, but I instead decided to focus on making my own ideas.

For the past handful of months I've been working on this little thing called Kanlen. I'm still figuring out exactly what "it is".

I'm not a fan of wasting too much time on repetitive tasks even though I repeat myself often, but, here we are.

I had an idea one day. What if there was a way, to build our your CLI command using a GUI of sorts? That would take the guesswork out of figuring out the correct syntax for the CLIs you use. For me, it's a lot of CRA.

It might also be nice to know what flags I have available to use in this command. I sure can't remember all that.

I'm going to briefly explain what Kanlen does and maybe from that, an idea of the app will form, but for now let's think of it like a developer's productivity tool.

What does it do?

Well, we already spoke about the whole CLI thing, so on we go.

Save Environment Variables

If you're like me, sometimes you get a new development computer and forget to jot down the environment variables you're using. That happened to me while building Reddex. Losing those variables was super annoying.

I thought it might be cool if you could store them somewhere online. Then if you switch machines, it crashes, or spontaneously combusts, you'll have a backup of those variables.

Save your code like Gists

Perhaps the bread and butter of Kanlen, well, at least the main idea of it since the beginning, was being able to save your favourite functions.

I have a few pieces of code that I like to bring between projects and if I could save them in a spot that's easily accessible, obviously that would be pretty alright.

These pieces of code are sharable and if you download the Kanlen VSCode extension, you can import your saved snippets right into your editor. On the flip-side, if you want to create a snippet, you can do that by selecting a block of code and running a specific command. It's pretty neat in my humble opinion.

Moving on

Those are a couple things it does, it you're interested in reading more about it, check out the main page Kanlen.

This is just a little side project I've been playing with since late 2020. It's still in development, but I love where it's going and maybe it'll help you too someday.