I would consider these tools critical to my day-to-day development and if I couldn’t use them it would be difficult for me to adjust to a new workflow.
So while there may be tools that I use on a day to day (something like slack) I didn’t consider those for this list.
iTerm2
As a macOS user, the first thing I always install as a part of my developing tooling is iTerm2.
While the default terminal macOS ships with maybe good, iTerm2 offers a lot of extensibility to really make the terminal fit your needs.
Zsh and OhMyZsh
For years now I have been a Zsh user and this was due in part because of OhMyZsh.
Zsh out of the box is a great alternative to bash but if you are looking to enhance Zsh more then OhMyZsh will offer that.
OhMyZsh can be looked at like a framework for zsh. It has a very wide community that offers a lot of interesting and useful packages that you can install to make your terminal experience a more tailored one.
GoLand
With Go being my primary programming language I find it very difficult to not use GoLand as my default IDE while coding.
While there are others such as Visual Studio Code and Go plugins that are available, I always find myself going back to GoLand to work on larger services or projects.
Albeit this may be due to my muscle memory for every single hotkey available.
Lens
If you have worked with Kubernetes you know how tiresome or repetitive typing kubectl commands may be. The lens is an IDE that allows you to connect to multiple Kubernetes clusters and view all resources (including CRDs) that are currently on said cluster. You can also inspect a given resource’s yaml definition and make changes with an editor that is built-in.
Another nice feature of the Lens is if you are administrating a Kubernetes cluster you can invite, share and configure access for a user by inviting them to a collaborative space within Lens.
Magnet
Unlike Windows or Linux, macOS does not offer a native windows manager. Magnet fixes this problem by giving you easy-to-remember hotkeys or locations of your monitor that allow you to snap applications in place.
If you are a macOS user I highly recommend Magnet (or any other windows manager). Once this becomes part of your workflow you will not be able to live without it.
Postman
If you are working with APIs - public, private, or in the form of microservices then Postman should be in your toolbox.
Postman takes away the headache of having to type out curl commands by hand. It offers an easy-to-grasp UI that offers a lot of control in how you want to tailor your request.
In addition, it also makes it easy to store, test, and collaborate on API requests as you can store them as projects which offer another subset of features.
Stoplight
Stoplight allows you to create and define an API with a UI. This lets you easily define URI paths, request bodies, request responses, authentications on specific routes, and everything in between.
While this in and of itself is very useful what it is actually doing is taking your API design and crafting it a valid OpenAPISpec (OAS) design in yaml.
This OAS is extremely important as it could be used for creating documentation, importing the spec into postman, generating code snippets, or be used as validation for your API.
Monodraw
Sometimes documentation or design documents for specific services or applications you are working on can be a bit dry and can benefit from having visual diagrams.
This is where Monodraw really fixed that problem for me. It allows you to easily draw out diagrams and most importantly makes it very easy to copy-paste those diagrams into code blocks, markdown, word documents, etc.
Todoist
While not a software-related tool I will say this one may be the most critical for me.
Todoist allows me to stay organized and focused on multiple projects at any given time.
Planning out tasks for a given project, assigning priorities, and then assigning due dates for those tasks really helps me stay on top of my work.
As 2022 starts to unravel I am curious to see what tools I will continue to use, which ones will drop off, or new tools that might become part of my day-to-day.
If you think there are better alternative tools to the ones or if you want to know more specifics about a specific tool feel free to reach out!