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Trix Cyrus
Trix Cyrus

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🚀 15+ Free & Powerful Tools Every Developer, Hacker, and Tech Enthusiast Should Bookmark in 2025 💻✨

#programming #ai #opensource #news

Hey everyone,
Over the past few months, I’ve been curating a list of high-quality, lesser-known but incredibly useful tools, platforms, and resources for developers, hackers, sysadmins, and tech nerds alike. These are tools I either personally use or came across while building side-projects, automating tasks, or doing security research.

Here’s a compact list I think many of you might find helpful:

🔧 Developer Tools

  • Liveblocks (https://liveblocks.io/): Add real-time collaboration to any web app (great Figma-style presence).
  • Ray.so (https://ray.so/): Turn code snippets into beautiful images—great for social/blog sharing.
  • PlayCode.io: Instant live preview playground for JavaScript/TypeScript.

🧠 AI-Powered Resources

  • Perplexity.ai: AI-powered search that actually cites sources—good for dev research.
  • Cursor.sh: A VS Code fork built with AI pair programming deeply integrated.
  • PromptHero: Inspiration for AI prompts (DALL·E, ChatGPT, Midjourney).

🌐 APIs & Data

  • Public-apis.io: Curated list of open, free APIs for every possible need.
  • Shodan.io: Search engine for the Internet of Things (for security researchers).
  • IPinfo.io: Robust IP data (great for geolocation, threat intelligence).

🧪 Cybersecurity / Hacking

  • TShark (CLI for Wireshark): Monitor traffic directly in terminal.
  • HackTricks: Encyclopedia of pentesting techniques and privilege escalation tricks.
  • Waybackurls: Tool to pull archived endpoints for a domain from Wayback Machine (great for recon).

🛠️ Self-hosted & Infra Tools

  • Uptime Kuma: Self-hosted status monitoring like UptimeRobot, with a beautiful UI.
  • N8N.io: Open-source Zapier alternative—automate anything with full control.
  • Firefly III: Self-hosted personal finance manager. Tech folks love tracking logs, so why not finances too?

🎁 Bonus Dev Gems

  • Repl.it Ghostwriter (now Replit AI): Surprisingly good AI coding assistant with real-time environment.
  • Github1s.com: View any GitHub repo in VS Code layout by replacing github.com with github1s.com.
  • Can I Use (https://caniuse.com/): For frontend devs—check browser support instantly.

✅ I’ve tried to avoid the overly hyped ones and focus on tools that either make you faster, help you self-host, or teach you something new.

If you have any gems in your personal stack—niche libraries, CLI tools, weird APIs, browser extensions—drop them below 👇 I’d love to add them to v2 of this list.

Let’s build a living library of underrated tools. 🚀

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