As you may know small programming challenges have proven to be an excellent way to level-up your skills fast. Like doing scales on the piano, juggling a football, or doing quick sketches in a notebook, programming challenges allow you to strengthen and expand on your programming fundamentals.
If you’re reading this article, it says something important about you: you care about your craft, and you care about your career.
While it’s obvious that practice and experience will make you a better software developer, so I’m going list some of the useful tools for software developers or should I say productivity tool for programmers? Maybe!
But one thing I can do for you is to help to make you a better software developer that you may never have thought of.
Atom
Atom is a relatively new code editor created by GitHub. It’s free, open source, and it looks great. It’s also extremely easy to use.
Though you might use a more feature-rich IDE for your development at work, Atom is a fantastic tool for hacking at scripts, or working on side projects which could prove to a very great Programmer productivity tool.
One thing that helps Atom shine in comparison to other code editors is its markdown preview mode. You can write notes in markdown and see an inline preview; extremely useful when working on Readme files and other documentation.
Travis CI
Travis CI is a hosted, distributed continuous integration service used to build and test projects hosted at GitHub.
Travis CI automatically detects when a commit has been made and pushed to a GitHub repository that is using Travis CI, and each time this happens, it will try to build the project and run tests.
Open source projects may be tested at no charge via travis-ci.org. Private projects may be tested at travis-ci.com on a fee basis. TravisPro provides custom deployments of a proprietary version on the customer's own hardware.
Although the source is technically free software and available piecemeal on GitHub under permissive licenses, the company notes that it is unlikely that casual users could successfully integrate it on their own platforms.
Postman
Postman is a Google Chrome app for interacting with HTTP APIs.
Postman makes it easy to test, develop and document APIs by allowing users to quickly put together both simple and complex HTTP requests.
Postman is available as both a Google Chrome Packaged App and a Google Chrome in-browser app. The packaged app version includes advanced features such as OAuth 2.0 support and bulk uploading/importing that are not available in the in-browser version. The in-browser version includes a few features, such as session cookies support, that are not yet available in the packaged app version.
Docker
Docker is an open source tool for running isolated containers on Linux making the deployment of apps inside containers faster.
Docker creates portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. The same container that the developer builds and tests on his PC can run in production, on VMs, in the cloud and a lot more places.
Docker provides this same capability without the overhead of a virtual machine. It lets you put your environment and configuration into code and deploy it.
The same Docker configuration can also be used in a variety of environments. This decouples infrastructure requirements from the application environment.
Code Climate
Code Climate is an automated code analysis tool that grades your app on test coverage, complexity, duplication, security, style and more. It comes with a free two-week trial. Even if you’re not prepared to take the plunge to pay, Code Climate can give you lots of valuable insight into the code quality of your latest personal project, or—if your team is open to the idea—of the product or service you’re building.
As a software developer, you probably have a sense for code smells: things that could be better. Yet, it can be difficult to know where to start when you feel like lots of things are wrong with your code.
Code Climate is a simple tool to give you an actionable starting point when trying to make things better.
CodeWars
Small programming challenges are an excellent way to level-up your skills. And that is why its one of those Programmer productivity tools and Like doing scales on the piano, juggling a football, or doing quick sketches in a notebook, programming challenges allow you to strengthen and expand on your programming fundamentals. They’re also an excellent way to increase your familiarity with programming languages you don’t have a lot of experience using.
Code Wars features hundreds of programming challenges graded by difficulty, and across various languages. There are many similar websites out there, like Project Euler, Hacker Rank, etc.
But my favorite thing about Code Wars is the ability to see the most highly-rated solutions after you’ve submitted your own. I almost always have something new to learn from these top-ranked solutions.
Skaffolder
Skaffolder allows you to create a web app, its structure and its pages, saving 30% of the time compared to standard timings, automating a process until now manual. The platform avoids writing repetitive source code by delivering quality code, that remains the property of the developer.
During the creation of the project, it gives the possibility to establish common guidelines among all the team members thus supporting the work of the team leader.
Skaffolder is the platform that supports IT companies to create web portals, save development time and costs. It's the easiest way to create quality web app.
CodePen
CodePen is one of those useful tools for software developers and itself as a playground for front-end developers. The site has simple premise: to present your code and output in an easily shareable format.
The site is full of impressive front-end development examples, from intricate animations to a 3D city. Though the site makes it easy to rapidly prototype front-end code, it may be most valuable for the sheer amount of creativity and inspiration available from its contributors, who will redefine your idea of what’s possible with today’s front-end technologies, and inspire you to try new things.
If you work in web development there's one other thing these software’s/sites might just provide - inspiration. The code sharing sites are overflowing with eye candy and the experiment-oriented spaces have some incredible ingenuity on display but they all, even the IDEs, promise a dash of newness!