In this modern culture, it’s literally impossible to have efficient results without using at least one tech solution. Programs, applications and tools have been created to ease the life of people and businesses. As a matter of fact, they have become fundamental approaches to increasing productivity. As a developer, your strengths manifest in your code and the tools you select to help you get the job done. From management platforms to collaboration and auto-completion tools, choosing the proper tools for the job is an ability that requires time to develop. But can determine the productivity and efficiency of a developer.
Sadly, there are so many productivity tools and choosing the right ones can be demanding. Productivity tools assist you in enhancing your performance, efficiency and satisfaction and optimise your working hours. Though the, inaccurate tools can slow down the production process and add unnecessary complexities. Below, you’ll learn about some of the pleasant productivity tools you should have.
Slack
This tool has been gaining much popularity lately. Slack is a communication tool that centres all the team members and the tools they use daily, no matter where they are or what they do—thereby improving collaboration and work productivity. Slack brings people together by classifying project information into separate channels. It also minimises the time spent communicating through channels like emails, allowing complete and undistracted focus on projects. Working on and sharing them is simple, and the chat option makes it easy and quick to ask team members questions. Therefore, team members can easily keep track of topics they’re interested in. The public channels allow team members to see what the designers are working on and sales to know the product team’s roadmap without flooding each others’ email inboxes.
Why Slack: With Slack, companies can integrate multiple tools and services and centralise notifications, files and data from several apps. Unlike other CS platforms, this tool offers a highly effective UI.
Trello
For a
Trello is a web-based, kanban-style list-making tool that empowers your team to manage any project, workflow and task tracking. With Trello, you can design a Kanban board for your team to track your tasks. Every task is created on a card. When you open that card, you find critical information such as the task description, deadline, team members responsible for that task, comments and relevant files attached directly to the card. Trello streamlines creative requests and promotes more fluid cross-team collaboration. Trello integrates with JIRA, MS Teams and Slack. When combined with Slack, Trello quickly helps you manage cards on your boards, change due dates and attach conversations to cards directly from Slack. Trello has various ways you can use to visualise your projects, such as Dashboard, timeline and tables. This gives you the ability to see high-level project status down to the day-to-day tasks.
Why Trello: Trello’s management boards and roadmap features simplify complex projects and processes. With Trello, your developer team can ship more code faster and give you the freedom to be more agile. Trello also keeps your remote team connected and motivated, regardless of location.
Tabnine
Tabnine is an AI-driven developer tool that boosts your productivity with every line of code you write. Tabnine anticipates and suggests the following lines of code in whatever language you choose for your project and the IDE of your preference. Tabnine suggests cohesive and consistent code completions that align with your coding patterns and minimise costly code review iterations. Tabnine alone can be used, but its real power is unchained when you activate its team-learning functionality. The more team members utilise Tabnine, the more it learns about what you prefer and patterns for the project’s code. It’s always to provide you with the best suggestions. Tabnine can run on your laptop, the server in your firewall and the cloud.
Why Tabnine: This tool does not store or share your code. All actions that share your code with Tabnine servers for the purpose of training team members call for explicit opt-in. Tabnine does not retain user code beyond the immediate time frame required for training models. And any team model generated by Tabnine is only accessible to your team members.
Habitica
Habitica gamifies your team’s goals, making productivity more enjoyable and achievable. Habitica makes it easier to get started with your project tasks by setting up an initial quest that tracks your progress over time and provides reminders of how close you are to accomplishing your goal. Check off tasks to level up your avatar and unlock features such as armour, pets and quests! Fight monsters with colleagues to keep each other accountable. Habitica is the perfect way to motivate yourself to accomplish anything. The best way to use this tool is through the browser extension. It will keep you accountable and assist you in staying on task. The real strength of Habitica comes when you adopt it with other people. You and your colleagues or friends can form a group, challenge each other by completing team goals and work together to level up your characters, challenge bosses, and win awards. Habitica uses Dailies to track habits that you want to complete in a more scheduled and iterative way. You set your Dailies in advance and check off what you have accomplished throughout the day.
Why Habitica: Habitica is all about accountability and responsibility. Completing your real-life tasks means you can tick off your Habitica tasks. This tool makes your tasks and targets fun to work on and easier to achieve.
Cloud Craft
Cloud Craft is momentarily available for only Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, If you’re primarily using GCP, it can still be helpful and provide a very intuitive drag-and-drop interface that allows you to connect different cloud infrastructure services. Not only is Cloud Craft excellent for planning, but it’s also great for budgeting. Once you have your infrastructure in place, you can access the budget tab, which will provide you with an estimated breakdown of your total costs. Since all significant clouds have similar pricing models, the results will translate well to Azure and GCP. Create a professional architecture diagram in minutes with the Cloudcraft visual designer, optimised for AWS with intelligent components. Whether starting a new project or importing your existing AWS environment, Cloudcraft is the fastest and easiest way to iterate on your design.
Why Cloud Craft: With this tool, you can share and edit diagrams online with your whole team and export them to docs, wikis & presentations. Cloudcraft analyses all the service relationships of your AWS environment and reverse engineers a complete system architecture diagram.
Coggle It
Coggle is a digital mind-mapping tool that facilitates brainstorming in a central and online location. It aims to help you and your developer team take notes, brainstorm ideas, visualise connections across concepts, and collaborate with others. Coggle gives you a transparent approach to sharing and understanding complex pieces of information and, at the same time, simplifying them. When using collaborative mind mapping, it is possible to do real-time brainstorming and add references, and you can use the mind maps as documents when you’re finished. This tech tool is specifically helpful for ideas that call for creative and critical thinking efforts. It facilitates free association and links text, images, and video in one place to form overflowing resources for project work. These help you create, discuss, and visualise relevant information for projects or tasks in less time.
Why Coggle: You can use Coggle to map out your process, systems and algorithms with the help of powerful flowcharting features.
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code is a lightweight but robust source code editor which runs on macOS, Linux and Windows. In recent years, Visual Studio Code has established itself as one of the most popular IDEs for developers. In addition to an excellent interface and code tools, Visual Studio Code is an incredible tool for productivity, thanks to its endless customisation options. Some of VS Code’s features include support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, code refactoring, and embedded Git. VS code has a deep remote development, you can connect a container running a different OS and use any VS Code plugins, linting, or debugging for that environment. VS Code has built-in support for JavaScript, TypeScript and Node.js and a vast ecosystem of extensions for other languages and runtimes like C++, Java, C# and Python. Visual Studio Code includes multiple extensions for FTP, allowing the software to be used as a free alternative for web development. Code can be synced between the editor and the server, without downloading any extra software.
Why VS Code: With this tool, you can debug your code right from the editor, launch or attach your running apps and debug with breakpoints, call stacks and an interactive console.
Pomodoro
As a developer, time management is essential in your line of work. For you to have continuous delivery, high level production and quality products, you must have a time management tool and Pomodoro is one of the best out there. Pomodoro timer is a customisable timer that operates on both desktop & mobile browsers. This tool helps you focus on the task you are working on. This tool uses a time management method known as The Pomodoro Technique. The technique offers a more productive approach to accomplishing your tasks. This method, with the help of a timer, breaks down your work into intervals, twenty-five minutes in length each interval and separated by short breaks of five minutes. The aim of the Pomodoro Technique is to use time as a valuable resource and partner in accomplishing what you want to do in the way you want to do it and to enable you to continually improve the way you work.
Why Pomodoro: The Pomodoro technique is highly effective as it helps you manage your time and work on a task without distractions. It is also beneficial as it helps you become more disciplined and think about your work. This technique is designed to combat multitasking and improve concentration.
Bottom Line
As a developer, your strengths are also manifested in the tools you choose to work with and not only in the code you write. As an engineer, maximising productivity should be your top priority and to achieve this—you must possess the right tools. Tools such as Trello, VS Code, Cloud Craft or Slack will skyrocket your productivity. They’ll help you implement and execute everything with perfection.
