15 Web Tools Every Developer Should Know to Boost Their Productivity
Know what exact tools to use to optimize your workflow
No doubt, software development is a challenging job that demands a great deal of mental effort. As developers, we always seek productive ways to improve our workflow and get more work done. But how do you improve this productivity and stay on top of your tasks? By using tools that help you get more done and are well suited for specific tasks.
A proficient developer knows what exact tool to use to optimize their workflow and drastically improve the time spent implementing solutions. The best productivity tools can help developers make the development process much more efficient, thus resulting in faster development speed.
If you can find a tool that takes half the time of manual implementation, then it's worth your while to use it. Here, we'll look at 15 excellent web tools that every developer should know and have in their arsenal to boost their productivity and work more efficiently.
Responsively
Responsively is a web tool that enables developers, specifically frontend developers, to develop responsive web apps 5x faster! It lets you preview your web application side-by-side on all target screens in a single window. The exciting part about responsively is that you can easily incorporate it into your workflow through its extensions without any learning curve, and it's open source.
Free-For-Dev
As developers, we all love free services but it can be hard to find them. Free-for.dev is a massive collection of services offering free tiers for developers and can be useful in making an informed decision.
The list is compiled from the contributions, reviews, ideas, and work of 1100 or more open source developers and authors.
FlyCode
Flycode is a product editor tool that allows anyone in a cross-functional team (be it a developer or a product member) to collaborate and make changes to the products without the need to know how to code. With FlyCode, non-technical teams can now collaborate on text, link, and image updates without requiring a developer's help.
By simplifying product edits, FlyCode helps free developers from product edits and enables teams to build products faster than ever before.
Devdocs
As developers, we often have to work with various technology stacks, resulting in having to jump from docs to docs frequently. DevDocs makes working with docs easy by combining multiple developer documentation of popular technologies into one clean, organized web UI.
With DevDocs, you can find any API documentation fast in an organized and searchable web UI. Additionally, there is offline support, a mobile version, a dark theme, keyboard shortcuts, and more.
CDN.JS
CDN JS is a free and open-source CDN provider built to make life easier for developers by collecting, hosting and providing front-end libraries on an enterprise level for free and without any limit.
The CDN JS network enables the loading of open source library files on your web applications faster and easier.
Sheety
Sheety is a tool that turns any Google sheet into a Restful JSON API instantly, for free. In other words, your spreadsheet can be queried and retrieved using URLs and simple HTTP requests.
With Sheety, you can power websites, apps, or whatever you like, and changes to your spreadsheet update your API in real-time. Don't get caught up in APIs and backends. Instead, focus on actually building.
VSCode Web Experience
Ever imagined being able to use VS Code anywhere at anytime without having to install the actual VS Code? VSCode.dev brings VS Code right to to the browser! By using Visual Studio Code for the Web, you can browse and edit source code repositories without installing anything, and you can make lightweight code changes completely in your browser.
As with VS Code desktop, VSCode.dev or "VS Code for the Web" has many features you love, such as syntax highlighting and search, as well support for extensions for working on your codebase and making simpler edits.
Also, you can access code from your local computer and hosted repositories.
Compressor
It is common for website images to be too large and unoptimized for web use. Using compression to save a few megabytes without sacrificing quality is an easy way to optimize web apps and save storage space.
With Compressor.io, you can drastically reduce the size of your images and photos without sacrificing quality while maintaining its quality.
unDraw
UnDraw is an open-source project with an impressive collection of illustrations built in SVG that can be downloaded and customized free without any attribution required.With the constantly updated SVG images, you can search to find whatever you need and customize the colors on the fly to match your brand identity.
Undraw.co is built to enable designers to contribute to open source while providing design skills to everyone.
Metatags
Metatags.io lets you preview, edit, generate and experiment with your content then preview how your webpage will look on Google, Facebook, Twitter and more!
You use meta tags to describe your page and the information it contains to search engines and those visiting your website
Devhints
Devhints.io is a web tool that helps you find already made code snippets, commands and popular cheat sheets. It has a modest collection of useful snippets displayed in a stylish way.
Frontend Checklist
An exhaustive list of all the elements a website should have is provided in this Front-End Checklist. You can use this as a resource before launching your website or adding a new HTML page to production.
These open-source checklists cover design and performance aspects of web applications
Unminify
Unminify is a free tool for unminifying minified JavaScript, CSS, HTML, XML, and JSON code making it readable. It uncompresses, reformats, and reindents code to make it more beautiful.
Transform Tools
Using Transform.tools, you can convert any code type from one language to another. You can, for example, convert HTML to JSX, CSS to JS, etc.
SVG Wave
This free SVG wave generator lets you create unique SVG waves for your next web design. Using SVG Wave, you can create your own beautiful custom waves and export them as png or SVG.
Conclusion
Often, highly productive individuals appear as though they are robots or magicians. However, you will usually find that the most efficient people are those who have found ways to optimize their workflow with the right tools.
I hope this list helps you become more productive, and if you know of other tools that are worth mentioning, do leave a comment about them below :)