The Essential Tools for Programmers

Reviewed by Lucas Chen - Tech Editor

Reviewed by Lucas Chen – Tech Editor

This is a list of essential tools and services from my coding workflow that I think should be part of every web programmer’s toolkit. Whether you a building a simple “Hello World” app or a complex web application, these tools should make your coding easier and increase productivity.

1. devdocs.io — API documentation for all popular programming languages and frameworks. Includes instant search and works offline too.

2. glitch.com — create your own web apps in the browser, import GitHub repos, use any NPM package or build on any popular frameworks and directly deploy to Firebase.

3. bundlephobia.com — quickly find the import cost (download size) of any package in the NPM registry. Or upload your package.json file to scan all dependencies in your project.

4. babeljs.io/repl — Write your code in modern JavaScript and let Babel transform your code into JavaScript that is compatible with even older browsers.

5. codeply.com — quickly build frontend responsive layouts with frameworks like Bootstrap, Materialize CSS and SemanticUI.

6. httpie.org — a command-line tool that is useful for making HTTP requests to web servers and RESTful APIs. Almost as powerful as CURL and Wget but simpler.

7. regexr.com — A good tool for testing your regular expressions in the browser.

8. jex.im/regulex — Write any regular expression into the editor and get a visual representation of how the pieces work.

9. buildregex.com — Construct regular expressions visually.

Also see: The Most Useful Websites on the Internet

10. explainshell.com — Type any Unix command and get a visual explanation of each flag and argument in the command.

11. tldr.ostera.io — Unix man pages are long and complex. This site offers practical examples for all popular Unix command without you having to dive into the man pages.

12. mockaroo.com — quickly generate dummy test data in the browser in CSV, JSON, SQL and other export formats.

13. jsdelivr.com — Serve any GitHub file or WordPress plugin through a CDN. Combine multiple files in a single URL, add “.min” to any JS/CSS file to get a minified version automatically. Also see unpkg.com.