Chrome DevTools, Git SCM, Oracle JDeveloper, Android Developers, GitLab, Postman, and NVIDIA Developer are the go-to tools for the modern developers, and rightly so.
But, if you dig deeper, you’ll stumble upon many hidden gems–robust, task-specific, and seamless platforms to accelerate your developer journey. We took the liberty to go on an easter egg hunt to find underrated developer tools that can perform repetitive tasks, save time, and deliver good performance.
explainshell
explainshell is a web-based application for parsing man pages, extracting options, and matching each argument to the relevant help text in the man page to explain a given command line. explainshell is built with a man page reader which converts a given man page from raw format to HTML, a classifier that goes through every paragraph in the man page and classifies it as contains options or not (algo/classifier.py), an options extractor that scans classified paragraphs and looks for options (options.py), a storage backend that saves processed man pages to MongoDB (store.py) and a matcher that walks the command’s AST (parsed by bashlex) and contextually matches each node to the relevant help text (matcher.py).
Regex101
regex101 is a multilingual regular expression debugger with real-time explanation, error detection and highlighting. The platform is free to use and supports PCRE, JavaScript, GoLang, and Java.
Namae.dev
namae is an open-source name availability checker that can scout various registries to check if the domain’s name is taken or not. It also has a name suggestion feature that auto-generates names. The source code is available on GitHub. It consists of Node.js Lambda for APIs and the React app for the web frontend and runs on ZEIT Now. namae supports various package registries and web platforms, such as Domains, GitHub, PyPI, RubyGems, Rust (crates.io), Homebrew / Homebrew Cask, Linux (Launchpad & APT), Twitter, Spectrum, Slack, Heroku, ZEIT Now, AWS S3, and js.org.
Slazzer
Slazzer is an AI-powered API that helps users remove background from any online image and fill it in with details. With its advanced computer vision algorithms, any image with a clear foreground and background can be processed in just a few seconds. Users can process up to 500 images per minute via the API, depending on the input image’s resolution. Slazzer is also available as a plugin, desktop app, and on-premise.
Flaticon
Founded in 2013, Freepik Company-owned Flaticon provides over 3 million editable vector icons for apps, websites and information design projects. Flaticon offers google extensions and robust features like patterns generator and font-face generator to visualise information on user interfaces. Icons are available in multiple formats, including PNG, PSD, SVG, EPS, and BASE 64. They are scalable and adaptable to projects, ranging from landing pages, social media templates, presentations to videos, brochures, and much more.
cronhub.io
Cronhub helps developers run any command or script on schedule without DevOps, managing servers and infrastructure. They can schedule and monitor recurring jobs without writing a single line of code. Cronhub allows developers to schedule jobs using any time interval or cron expression. Users can set up one-click uptime and running time monitoring for recurring jobs. The platform sends users instant alerts if jobs fail or run longer than expected. Users can invite and collaborate with team members using a shared dashboard. Lastly, Cronhub offers rich analytics on critical metrics of the jobs.
P.S: Learn X in Y minutes
If you are a professional programmer looking to learn a new language, Learn X in Y minutes is the place for you! It features over 20 community-contributed short programming language tutorials, accessible and editable via a public Github repository.
