Boost Your Coding Speed with These Productivity Tools

#webdev #beginners #programming #productivity

Deadlines are one of those things that no one likes but it is inevitable. Developers also have to deal with deadlines. Whether it is a personal project that you want to complete on time or a client’s project that wants the application to be deployed as soon as possible. We as developers are always in a hurry in such situations to complete tasks on time. Most of the time we have to rush when a few days remain of the deadline.

Rushing on the last days can be avoided by increasing productivity. It can be achieved by speeding up certain tasks. Tools have become such powerful today that they can provide solutions to most of the things that developers do. Using tools we can easily speed up the process of coding, managing tasks, navigating the codebase, etc.

So, today we are going to look into some tools that help you in pacing up your coding. Let’s get started.

Documatic

A search engine for your codebase; Ask Documatic a question and find relevant code and insights in seconds

Documatic is a code search engine that queries through your codebase to find the related code block. It incorporates searching words along with patterns that recognize certain code blocks. For instance, searching the database connection in the codebase, you can make a query using documatic such as “db connection”. It will provide you with the code block that has a database connection. Making it easier to navigate through any codebase.

It is quite important to understand the codebase before writing a single line of code. The search engine can help you in understanding the codebase. It can help you when you are new to a project by learning the codebase through a query. Otherwise, valuable time can be wasted on meetings and queries to the manager/maintainer of the codebase.

It can be helpful in open source contribution while understanding others’ codebase.

Hatica

Hatica aggregates activity from all your work apps and builds insights and software engineering dashboards to help teams drive velocity, alignment, and well-being.

There are various ways that kill a developer’s productivity. I have discussed some of them in a recent article with the title Top 7 Things That Kill Developer Productivity. In that article, I have discussed Hatica along with other tools. Hatica helps engineering teams boost developer productivity by improving the workflow, identifying bottlenecks, and tracking progress. By doing this, it can free a significant amount of developer’s time.

There are various ways you can integrate into the workflow to increase productivity here are a few of them:

Reduced context switching of developers as they can focus on their tasks from a centralized view.
Automate repetitive tasks so that developers don’t stuck with non-core tasks.
Improved visibility of the task and their progress through the dashboard. Helping developers to prioritize their work more effectively.

All this will lead to speeding up the project and will be able to complete tasks before deadlines.

Tabnine

An AI assistant that speeds up delivery and keeps your code safe

Tabnine is a powerful AI tool that can help in speeding up the coding process. It is designed to provide intelligent suggestions and auto-completions as developers write code. It is available as an extension in most of the known coding editors. It is included in the following such as VS Code, IntelliJ, Eclipse, Neovim, and others.

Here are a few of the key features that can help in speeding up the coding process:

Auto Completion: The key feature of tabnine is its code generation. It can generate code in major programming languages with much accuracy. It does not require a lot of prompts to generate code. It will help in generating most of the commonly used code blocks.
Suggestions: The suggestion of tabnine is determined by its surrounding code, comments, variable names, and function name to generate suggestions. It will save developers time as they don’t need to recall function names and syntax.
Reduced Typing: By providing useful suggestions and generating code, it will reduce the time that will require to code.

All these features will help in effective coding in lesser time.

GitPod

The developer platform for on-demand cloud development environments. Create software faster and more securely.

GitPod is a Chrome extension that provides a cloud development environment directly from GitHub directly. This comes in quite handy when making quick changes or reviewing PR. It quickly opens VS Code-based IDE directly in the browser. Since VS Code has an in-built terminal in the IDE, you can run different commands. Edit and run commands as per your requirement. It saves lots of time as I don’t need to locally set up every project.

As a repository maintainer in Hacktoberfest, I used to raise pull requests to the repository. You can customize the IDE with extensions and themes to make it look as same as your local VS Code.

GitHub Actions

Automate your workflow from idea to production

GitHub actions help in automating the task. it offers a CI/CD pipeline to automate various aspects of SDLC directly from the GitHub repository. You can directly create a YAML file in the repository to start automating different tasks. You can define different jobs to run as per the triggers. There are various GitHub-defined keywords for triggers such as pull, push, fork, etc.

Apart from the trigger, you can define a cron job that runs at a particular time. In this way, you can automate another task too. In jobs, you can run another file in the repository to run. Making it more control over the jobs. There is also a marketplace where you can get already-defined actions for your project. Automating repetitive tasks like running tests, and deploying or scheduling corn jobs through GitHub Actions can save a lot of time for you. Thus speeding up the process of development of a project.

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Conclusion

As the codebase grows, the complexity increases. It can become harder to manage and will consume lots of time. These kinds of developer tools can help you in coding, managing work, generating code, and navigating through different codebases easily. Thus, allowing developers to increase their productivity.

I hope this curated list of tools will help you in effective coding and project management. Thanks for reading the article.