Useful tools

For future reference, here is a bunch of tools/services I have used in the past.

Netlify is one of the best resources I can recommend for front end developers. This blog runs for free thanks to Jekyll, Minimal Mistakes and Netlify. Before Netlify, I was hosting this on GitHub Pages or Gitlab Pages and it was a lot of steps to setup a CDN, custom domain, configure SSL etc but Netlify is all of this rolled into one, for free!

Images

• Free images from Unsplash. I’ve used this URL https://picsum.photos/1200/900/?random as a background image for apps to get a random image of a fixed dimension each time. More URLs like this are documented here.

Videos

• Free videos from coverr
• Screen Capture - CamStudio. On a Mac, I just use the QuickTime video player that is already installed. This is my new favorite with features like highlighting mouse etc.
• Virtual Reality video player for Oculus - Whirligig
• Simple video editing - iMovie.

Audio

• Audio editing - Audacity

Icons

• Noun Project
• Font Awesome to easily add icons to web apps.
• Material Icons to use with Angular Material in my apps. Setup instructions are here.

Task Management

• Getting Things Done book summary: I read this and tweaked it to suit my style/needs.
• Asana: I use this to practice GTD from above currently.
• Trello: Use this before Asana, check this for inspiration.

Code Management

• Github for public repositories. Plenty of awesomeness here.
• Bitbucket for private repositories.
• Gitlab also for private repositories - love that they have free CI/CD.

Code

• Writing code working with PDFs for extracting text etc - Poppler. Poppler for windows
• Moviepy for working with videos using Python.
• Check my starred repositories for more.

Presentations

• Beautiful AI: exports to PPT files, which is great for when I can’t use anything else.
• Reveal-md for super fast presentations using RevealJS for the web.
• Reveal-webpack-kit along with Netlify to host slides easily.
• Reveal-d3 for interactive charts in slides.

Editors

• VS Code - switched to this when I started developing dot net core apps. Great support for most languages.
• Sublime Text before VS Code

Flow Charts

• Drawing simple flow charts and some other diagrams - mermaid. All the diagrams are built using a markdown like script that goes right into HTML.
• Drawing flow charts in the browser with a GUI- draw.io. All diagrams can be exported as an XML file but changes can’t be made to the diagram using the XML file - this is mainly to store a local copy and work on it later on the website. There is a handy “Search Shapes” feature that can be used to pull in icons/shapes into the diagram. This saved me so much time when building architecture diagrams using AWS components.

Design

• Canva - I’ve used it for Infographics, event invites etc. Just pick a template and start editing. The key is to not tweak a template too much - since I am not a design guy, touching colors etc usually ends in me wasting a lot of time.
• Making screen mockups/prototyping apps - Mockflow. I mostly just need images and don’t need to link areas of one screen to another so this works just fine. I usually use Angular Material for development and most of those components are available to drag and drop into the mockup.
• Dribbble for inspiration.