With a new year fast approaching it will soon be time to make some New Year’s resolutions. We all want to be more productive; so here is our list of some development productivity tools that we think you should check out in the new year.
To make this list easy to digest, we’ve split it up into a few key sections:
Coding Productivity Tools
These are day-to-day development productivity tools. Some of them will run quietly in the background and others are used more actively, but all of them will make you a more productive developer.
Postman
Postman is a collaborative API testing tool. It allows you to build payloads to send to an API in order to quickly and repeatedly test endpoints.
This is much faster than writing the code to interact with an API. The fact that you can collaborate with your team on creating the payloads means everyone can benefit from this productivity boost.
Postman is available on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Dash
Dash is a tool for downloading documentation to make it searchable offline. It can hook into many other tools to fully integrate into your development environment.
Working remotely and on the go can be excellent for your personal productivity, but sometimes internet connections can put a stop to your development when you need to look something up. This isn’t an issue if you use Dash.
Dash is available on Mac and iOS.
Oh My Zsh
Oh My Zsh is a framework of terminal tools built on top of Zsh. If you’ve been using the stock terminal program that comes with your operating system, then Oh My Zsh will be a breath of fresh air.
There are thousands of small functions that have been created to make you more productive in the terminal, and a huge catalogue of community-made additions.
Oh My Zsh is available on Mac, Linux, and Windows via Cygwin.
Prettier
Prettier is a tool that will integrate with your text editor to allow automatic formatting of many common file types, such as CSS, JavaScript and JSON.
It is heavily opinionated, which means so long as you’re happy with its opinions, you can install and forget about it. It will automatically reformat your code when saved.
Having it as part of a build process means your entire team could benefit from standardized formatting.
Prettier is available on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Rubocop
Rubocop is a Ruby style checker, if you don’t code in Ruby there will be similar tools for your language of choice.
Like other linters, Rubocop will alert you to style violations in your Ruby code. It acts as a static code analyser.
Rubocop will run in any environment that can run Ruby.
CircleCI
CircleCI is a continuous integration tool. It allows you to automatically run a suite of tools against your project every time you update it in version control.
The most common use of tools like CircleCI is to run your tests automatically, but anything that can be scripted can get ran automatically.
CircleCI is a SaaS-based tool and will run projects designed for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
Project Productivity Tools
The most productive you can be as a developer is when you put something in place to allow others to do your work for you. This frees up your time to work on tasks where you bring value.
The development productivity tools listed here, once set up, will allow other members of your team to work on tasks that would traditionally have required a developer.
Zapier
Zapier allows you to link multiple services together without needing to write any code yourself.
For example, if you wanted to automatically add new contacts from your CRM tool into your email campaign tool, you could hook both together using Zapier.
Zapier is a SaaS tool that ties multiple services together, including some of the other tools we’ve mentioned in this list.
Data Hero
Data Hero allows you to combine data from multiple sources and generate reports based on these.
This means you don’t need to import data from several places and work out ways to combine it, Data Hero will do this heavy lifting for us.
Data Studio
Data Studio is a Google tool that allows you to combine data from multiple sources just like Data Hero. Unlike Data Hero there is a lot more you can do with a free plan.
You get more from Data Studio if you use other Google products, like Google Ads or Google Analytics, but you can add non-Google data into Data Studio.
Everyday Work Productivity Tools
This final group consists of productivity tools that will help with your day-to-day development, as well as a range of other non-development tasks.
TextExpander
TextExpander lets you write a small keyword and will replace it with a longer snippet of text. We’ve written before about how developers can use TextExpander when writing support tickets or for recalling your most used bash commands.
You can use TextExpander by yourself or collaborate on snippets with your team.
TextExpander is available on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Google Chrome.
Omnifocus
Omnifocus is a todo application heavily inspired by the Getting Things Done methodology.
It breaks projects down into tasks to be done and lets you categorize those tasks in ways that hides what you can’t do now. So, at any moment you can see what you can be working on.
Omnifocus is available on Mac, Windows, Web, and iOS.
Trello
Trello lets you collaboratively work on tickets that slot into lists and boards. It is an online version of a sprint or kanban board in an office.
It is often used for team collaboration – we use it to organize content for the TextExpander blog! It can be used to keep track of things to do on a much smaller scale.
We have an article on how you can run your hiring process through Trello.
Trello is available primarily as a web-based application but has clients on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android.
What Development Productivity Tools do you use?
We love talking about productivity, and we love being productive developers, so please join in the conversation in our comments with your favorite productivity tools or techniques.
