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Discussion on: 16 free tools & services that any developer should use

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erebos-manannan profile image
Erebos Manannán •

My additions.

Online/cross-platform:

  • GitKraken: Another Git GUI client, happens to be less annoying than the others. Free for open source, early startups, and non-commercial use.
  • VirtualBox: The defacto standard for development VMs
  • Vagrant: Automate VM setup. Combined with SaltStack a very powerful tool.
  • RealtimeBoard: Like a whiteboard in the cloud, except better in every way. Not free, but has a free edition. You can just drag & drop stuff like PowerPoint presentations on it, zoom and scroll pretty much infinitely, etc.
  • Freepik: So far my favorite source of vector icons and such for presentations, architectural diagrams, etc.
  • Slack: Basically the communication tool of choice for technical teams and projects nowadays.
  • Discord: Quite a lot like Slack, but different. More aimed for non-professional use, but works for business use quite decently as well.
  • Paletton: Color scheme designer
  • IFTTT: If This Then That - automate various actions and applications easily.
  • Zapier: A bit similar to IFTTT, but .. different.
  • Font Awesome: When you need icons for your web apps (and with some work other apps).
  • Google Fonts: Quite possibly the best online font library for web use.
  • Insomnia: REST client. Like Postman, but with less bugs, and overall feels better.
  • SSL Server Test: Identify SSL configuration errors.
  • SendinBlue: Transactional email service - send 300 emails/day for free. Much more than enough for various monitoring notifications etc., especially if combined with e.g. Google Groups.

For Windows:

  • ConEmu: Better terminal for Windows
  • Cygwin: Bring a bunch of the GNU utilities and other tools from Linux to Windows environments
  • Greenshot: Simple and good screenshotting tool.
  • WinMerge: Excellent diff tool.
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shaunagordon profile image
Shauna Gordon •

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.

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nicholascloud profile image
Nicholas Cloud •

Winmerge is great. BeyondCompare (scootersoftware.com/) is my go-to, however. Commercial, but worth the money. And cross-platform too!