Tools to work as a developer

Photo by Mikaela Shannon on Unsplash

In this post, I’m going to talk about the tools that I use weekly. There are more that I use but in this list I add the ones that I couldn’t work without them.

Slack

I use this application to send messages to my coworkers. You can create channels to talk about some specific topic. You have to control slack or slack will control you especially if you are in a lot of channels and you receive a lot of messages.

Draw.io

With this application, I can draw diagrams online. When I have to design some new application or explain something a drawing is better than a thousand words. I can export these drawings into different file formats and when I have to draw something I use this tool.

Jira

With this tool you can create tickets, you can create Kanban boards, you can set a working flow of a team, you can get statistics of your team performance. In all the places that I have worked, they were using Jira.

Confluence

It’s a wiki where you can document and share things with the team or with other teams. Having things documented is important on a team basis. You can document there your policies, your agreements as a team, the modules of software that your team owns or the metrics of the team.

Hangouts

I use it to do video calls daily. When you are in the video call you have a chat where you can write some link or some information with the caveat that when the call finishes you lose that message or whatever you have written there. When I connect through my phone as a router I adjust the resolution to the smallest possible to decrease the data used.

iTerm

I use this command line application to navigate through the filesystem, create directories, copy files, moving files. I’m trying to do more and more things in the command line and avoid depending on the visual tools because this way I can work faster.

Kanbanflow

I use this tool to plan my week things that I want to do and it also has a Pomodoro timer to be focused 25 minutes and rest the next five. I’m using it right now that I’m writing this blog post.

Intellij Idea

It’s the IDE that I have used more during my time as developer. Before this IDE I used at the beginning of my career Eclipse but when I discovered Intellij I never change again for Java projects.

Google Calendar

All the meetings that I have every week are scheduled in this application. At the beginning of the week, I look at the calendar and see the most important meetings that I have to attend and if I have to prepare something.

Android Studio

I have used this application to program an Android application. It’s like Intellij. You can use different emulators to check how your application works on different devices.

Postman

This application is perfect to have a collection of projects to call to different APIs. I create one project per API and in each project, I have different calls to the different endpoints. This way you can have in a single place all the calls at hand to play with your APIs.

Google docs

I use it to write shared documents, presentations, spreadsheets or surveys. You can share with people giving read and write access permissions. You can add comments to a shared document and you can discuss with other coworkers things about content or ideas.

Visual studio code

I started using this IDE for non-Java projects. If I have to write some application that needs Html5, CSS, Javascript or PHP I use this one. I’m writing this blog post using visual studio code.

Alfred

This tool is useful to search for documents, open applications, using the calculator. You don’t have to use the mouse when you use this application.

Spotify

I use it to listen to music while I’m working. I have to listen to chill-out music while I’m working. If I listen to rock or some other kind of music it stresses me and more tired after some time listing to it.

Chrome

I use this browser daily because I use google apps to work so is a good choice and because of all the plugins that it has. I know that consumes a lot of memory and that google uses my data to show me better ads.

Reminders

This mac application allows me to set reminders about things that I have to do. It synchronizes well with my mac devices so when I write a reminder on my iPhone I can read it afterward in my Macbook Air or vice versa.

VMWare Horizontal client

This application allows me to connect to a Virtual desktop interface (VDI). It’s useful because all the applications that I develop are inside this virtual computer and If I change my client computer I can resume the work where I stoped it.

Conclusions

These are the applications that I use weekly. Which are the apps that you use to work?