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Tools that Make Me Productive as a Software Engineer

Mangabo Kolawole on March 03, 2024

As a developer, prioritizing your tools is essential because they are pivotal in achieving your goals. Being skilled is valuable, but the right too...
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bdmorin profile image
Brian

Lots of tool overlap.
hurl.dev/ could give you an all in one for insomnia and postman
Coda.io could replace obsidian, and notion, and jira

Mermaid or terrastruct can give you programmatic diagrams

Thanks!

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Mangabo Kolawole

Tanks @bdmorin

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Rasheed

Thanks.
I checked coda.io/
For personal with integrations it cost $10/month per Doc Maker
Any cheaper alternate ?

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Brian

I may not have the full lay of land, but Coda seems to have a unique spot between airtable and notion. Coda let's you turn data into interactive documents. I'm not aware of any other service that does this. Doesn't mean they don't exist.

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Valentin Iljaž • Edited

Yo, this article is super cool! I checked out Excalidraw and I'm totally gonna use it in the future.

Also, I find it helpful to have a set of micro tools ready at my fingertips. Check out webacus.dev

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Mangabo Kolawole

thank you @valentiniljaz

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Marllon Gomes

i'll use it too, helps a lot for drafts

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Rishab Kumar

Great post, lots of overlap.
Haven't used Linear and Obsidian.
Huge fan of the Postman VS Code extension and Notion.
Also look into Thunder Client, was using that before the Postman.

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Mangabo Kolawole

I will check Thunder Client. It looks interesting

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tq-bit

A heads up here. Thunderclient is great for solo work, our team had to drop it because it changed its git feature to paid-only over night, making our collections useless.

We're using Bruno now, it has an open source version as well

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Andy R • Edited

Thanks I'll try some of those, I use JIRA and yes it is overcomplicated or rather tries to do too much but it's not good at reporting either, we use Confluence for documentation but it's not free. I like Postman but always end up going back to Fiddler for some reason. I used wireshark for the first time in ages the other week to diagnose a local issue. But checkout. http files also in. Net if you use it. I've stopped using resharper now also. I will try some of your recommendations thank you 🙂

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Mangabo Kolawole

Thanks for the recommendations @arabbetts

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Al Gonzalez • Edited

Thanks for sharing.

I'll be looking at Linear and Phind as well as revisiting Excalidraw.

Some tools I use include:

  • Mermaid in markdown and draw.io for diagrams
  • dbdiagram.io to generate ER diagrams
  • Hoppscotch instead of Postman (once they required an account)
  • I also use .http files in Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio to call API endpoints

Not sure why, but a lot of the images on the Linear's web site are not showing up for me. At least not the ones from cdn.sanity.io links.

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Shashwat • Edited

I find Github CoPilot pretty useful in generating AI based completions. It really saves a lot of time and works for all the programming languages and IDEs I work on.

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Mangabo Kolawole

This is definitely true. It has been a long time I used Copilot but I have learned that it got really really good

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Sm0ke • Edited

cool list.
Ty K!

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Mangabo Kolawole

thank you @sm0ke

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Kodex

Just to add to the Obsidian tool. What makes it even better is that it's completely free, and you get every feature that you would if you paid, the only thing you actually pay for is their sync feature, which you don't have to stick with either. I personally use Obsidian for all my note taking, task tracking, and basically everything else outside of my code editor, because it also has a fairly large collection of extensions, like one called Remotely Save which let's you sync your local changes to the cloud of your choice, even a self hosted cloud. So I've got mine currently synced to OneDrive, which allows me to take my notes and tasks to the mobile app without having to pay for anything I don't already pay for.

The main motivator for me personally to choose Obsidian is because their payment model aligns with my personal views on developer tools, and that is that you get all the features for free if all you need is your solo setup, bit you only pay if you want to be able to collaborate in a business setting where paying becomes relatively negligible. That I feel creates an incentive to make your software work well enough that people will want to pay you for it (they have a donation model as well). So instead of locking basic features behind a pay wall for a cash grab, you need to make your software sell itself by it doing its job well.

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Mangabo Kolawole

This is exactly what I feel about Obsidian and their business model too.
The project is still evolving and they are adding more features. The quality and the UX of this software speak for themselves.

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Darshit-dev • Edited

You can explore Apidog also , It is full featured proof API client

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Mangabo Kolawole

the UI looks interesting. Might check it

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Rense Bakker

I didn't know linear... Haven't used it yet, but I think I'm already in love 😁

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Mangabo Kolawole

You will definitely love it. It saves a lot of time 😅

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Emmanuel Eneche

Great 👏 . Postman extension on VS code is great too.

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Mangabo Kolawole

Definitely @emmabase

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RorySuda

I love Obsidian & Linear! I just checked out Bruno and it looks great. Thanks for the recs!

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Mangabo Kolawole

you are welcome @glissadist

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Kevin Ramirez

When you talk about documentation, how do you share the documentation in your team? You create a website or share your Obsidian/Notion?

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Mangabo Kolawole

It depends.

If it is private, I will just leave it in Obsidian.

Otherwise, I will just copy/paste the content in Notion and share it. Notion is very powerful on the collaborative side of things.

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Alina

Our Streamdal team loooves excalidraw

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Abdurrahman Al Hanif

What about clickup.com or monday.com?

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Mangabo Kolawole

I am not using those.

However, I used monday.com as an alternative to JIRA a few years ago.

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Alex Kaul

Thanks for sharing! Also take a look at Freeter: github.com/FreeterApp/Freeter
Story on how I boosted my productivity with it: dev.to/alexk/how-i-boosted-my-prod...

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Ralph Hightower

What? No mention of GitHub?

Evernote is a great cloud storage app for notes, files, etc. It's available for Windows, and Android; probably for iOs. Say you're on vacation at the beach and have an "ah-ha" idea and likely to forget it before you return to work. Jot it in Evernote. I was creating a list of items: 1), 2), and it automagically filled in 3).
Best Note Taking App - Organize Your Notes with Evernote

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Mangabo Kolawole

Nice. Thanks for the suggestions @ralphhightower

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RESTful_Otaku • Edited

Copilot is nice as a boilerplate and easy completions tool (given enough context) it can extend what LSP's already do quite well, it still cannot solve real problems and will hallucinate some jank every now and then but it can make an experienced dev a little more productive and save my hands/wrists typing.

Plus sometime I just want some charts with python, make me charts, I don't want to have to actually get good at python. :)

I would not advise this for learning with juniors/CS students however, you would lose a lot of important milestones and neural unlocks along the way. Maybe use GPT to explain a concept in another way to better understand it but do not let it code for you early on.

I learned to code in early 2000s so thankfully I avoided this addictive crutch in my formative years.

Now if it could only do my f2f/client meetings for me, I could call it a real win and go back to my quiet place.

I also personally like inkdrop.app/ for markup notes though it does come with a price but paying annually works out reasonable for cloud syncing. But there is excellent dev support for that price from one guy and a thriving community with tons of native plugins supported.

insomnia.rest/ is my companies preferred API testing tool, but postman.com/ is solid too. I particularly like some of the extras on the team variant of Insomnia. Some of the automations and code actions in there are great. The plugins are pretty nice too.

Been using excalidraw.com/ for ages, only good things to say.

Clickup is used by our teams but I personally find it too cluttered and annoying/cumbersome, as do many of the engineers in my team, seems prod owners love that crap, but cest la vie. Feels like a red tape app to me. (There is no link to this for a reason, never let prod owners/account managers know it exists).

Then again, we also use Jira and that is painful in its own unique ways.

Vercel's v0.dev/ is really nice tool for quickly spitting out basic front end component HTML when I just want some UI inspiration (I am backend mainly so I suck at UI). Give me htmx.org/ and Go/Rust templating and I am happy.

My biggest boost to productivity is still github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim with a few choice plugins and LSPs and github.com/tmux/tmux as my sessionizer. Just that whole flow has made my life simpler and faster. Plus learning terminal commands and how to really use them, github.com/jqlang/jq, github.com/AlDanial/cloc, awk, grep, cmp, sort and sed.

Also recently added github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit, nice terminal based visual git editing tool when I sometimes have to get dangerously fancy with git (though one should avoid getting fancy with git at all costs).

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Mangabo Kolawole

I really like your comment. Thank you for sharing your insights on these tools.

Regarding AI too, I believe that beginners should avoid that, but it seems quite impossible for them. Anyway, we will see how it goes in the next few years.

I will test Neo Vim, a lot of people talk about it and I feel like I am missing something. Maybe, the last step to make me a 10x dev? 😂

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Yahaya Oyinkansola

I have been hearing of Linear, but I have never really tried it out, would test it and see. Thanks for writing this very insightful article. Another tool that got me was phind.ai, looks like I would be using that together with ChatGPT for writing blog articles, these resources are awesome!

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dilli Prasad • Edited

How about a Cursor? It is similar to the VS Code IDE but takes development to the next level by incorporating AI. They offer a 15-day free trial, so give it a try; you will feel more productive.

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Ursa

Great post, thanks for sharing. If you want to try a tool that can help manage tasks, kanbantool.com/ might be the right choice. It's even more efficient now, when it's intoduced an AI assistant. With the help of that feature you will have even more time to focus on your work.

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Mangabo Kolawole

Interesting @ursa

I will add it to my list of tools to test :)

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vashnavichauhan18

wow awesome tools !

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Mangabo Kolawole

thank you @vashnavichauhan18

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Lemme.code

Notion is great help in staying organized and stuff idk, why people underestimate it

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Mangabo Kolawole

Notion is surely powerful when you know how to use it

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Gaurav Verma

Good tools for productive 💯

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Faris Han

Thanks!

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Aimee

What about docusaurus.io/ have you used this?

Thanks for the other tools. Just got a new job as frontend software engineer from being a Web developer using react. :D

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Md Shoriful Islam Ashiq

Thank you 😊

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Mangabo Kolawole

You are welcome @mdsiaofficial

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MaorBril

Most people ignore terminals (suffer through iTerm2).

Try out warp.dev !.

Also, for journaling and notes I recommend Logseq

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Mangabo Kolawole

Interesting suggestions @maorbril

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Hit Bheda

it helped lot