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Tools to boost your Developer Experience

Whether you are working on the back-end or the front-end, having the right tool for the job, can really make a difference some times.

With this blog post, I want to share with you some of the tools that I use pretty much every day and I believe can be useful to any software developer.

TL;DR

Handle JSON, YAML and XML in the terminal

jq, yq and xq are command line tools that allow you dealing with JSON, YAML and XML documents directly from your shell. If you haven’t seen them before you may ask why someone would want to look at some JSON in the terminal?

Well, most of the time they are used in scripts, generally piped to curl or http (see the second tool) to parse and extract data from API calls.

In the examples below I hit a public API that returns countries VAT. This is the output of a GET (all countries) without using jq.

jq has some built-in operators we can use to count, select, filter and much more. In the following example I simply count how many items the .rates array has.

We can finally extract the values that we need and use them in a bash script!

Here are the commands I have used above, feel free to experiment with them:

A friendly command line HTTP client

As you can see in the image below, I am hitting a public weather API to get the London’s current weather, the command I have ran is:

You can achieve the same result using a combination of commands, curl and jq, mentioned above.

I personally use both approaches, but I use http when I can’t remember how to do some specific requests using curl and I’m too lazy to check the manual. I must have googled “curl post json” hundreds of times 😂

It’s easy as that!

You can specify the HTTP method (PUT, POST, PATCH, etc) before the URL and passing Headers is also straightforward, just add Key:Value pairs after the URL, they will become part of the HTTP request headers.

Open every link in the right browser

I like it because it’s lightweight, smart and not intrusive. For instance it won’t prompt you to choose a browser if you are already in one, or it will not display browsers that are not open, this means if you keep your favourite one on, you won’t need to decide every time, choosy will use that.

It comes very handy when you need to open a link from the Terminal or within an Email, Slack, Trello etc.

Search through code faster

Also called The Silver Searcher, it’s a tool like grep but optimised for developers.

I also like that the output it’s nice and clear:

Stay up to date with GitHub

Rather than looking at emails or checking the website I prefer to to receive a push notification when someone opened or reviewed a pull request.

Once expanded, you can see the notifications history and jump directly at them if you like.

If you are scared to receive hundreds of notifications with this, don’t worry! You can decide on what repositories you want to be notified.

Most of us use Jira these days, so why not having a little helper.

You can also run jira new to quickly create a new ticket!

Why should we leave the terminal?

If you are a Spotify user you may find the next one useful.

This utility allows you to play/stop , search for songs or playlists, skip, adjust the volume, and more.

one-command deployments

now allows you to deploy to the cloud any project that has package.json or Dockerfile.

I am not a power user but I want to recommend it because it helped me a few times during prototyping or when I didn’t have time to build an own infrastructure (e.g. hackathons), you really want to use now.

Offline documentation

Documentation for a load of frameworks and libraries have been imported, and it works offline.

They have also introduced cheat sheets for shortcuts and useful commands (e.g. vim, Kubernetes, etc).

Use your iPad or iPhone as external screen

That’s it!

I hope you find them useful, if you want to recommend a tool that I haven’t included, please comment below.

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