Ben's Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List
Last update 25/05/2019
Ben’s Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool - Yes, this might sound familiar and I actually got the inspiration from Scott Hanselman’s Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool! Anyway, below are my favourite tools that help me as a developer (and user):
- Fira Code - My favourite font (with ligature support)!
- GitKraken - The best git GUI that I’ve ever used. It seriously just blows all over GUI’s out the water. Chunking has never been so easy!
- Kitty - The one terminal emulator to rule them all. It’s my new favourite.
- Ranger - For the vim users, the ultimate companion!
Chrome
- Bitwarden - Keep ’em password safe. An open source password manager with native apps on all platforms - and an awesome chrome plugin!
- CamelCamelCamel - Price watcher and price comparer on amazon. Don’t miss those deals!
- Octotree - Browse github repos with index trees, enough said.
- UBlock Origin - If you’re using AdBlock, its time to switch to this open source solution, unless you’re in favour of whitelisting.
Mobile Apps
- IFTTT - Automation on your phone!
- Waze - Use it daily, smart sat nav (owned by google)
SQL Server Management Studio
- SQL Operation Studio - A competitor to SSMS! It’s in preview, but if you like VS code, you’re going to love this!
- Paste The Plan by Brent Ozar - Execution plans are awesome, but sometimes it can be difficult to know exactly what one should do to improve performance. Paste the plan lets you share your execution plan with the world to get feedback - hopefully, it gains more traction!
- SQL Complete by Devart - Proper intellisense on SSMS
- SQL Search by Redgate - No longer search manually for text, this is like ‘SearchEverything’ by voidtools but for SSMS, seriously amazing!
- SSMS Coloured Connection String - The amount of wasted hours trying to figure out why my updated proc wouldn’t work, only to find that it had been executed on the wrong server…
- Statistics Parser by Richie Rump - Reading through statistics io and time logs is painful. So paintful infact, that I developed my own tool. However, this parser is more robust and does everything I want. You to paste your output and get human readable results! Beautiful.
Virtualization
- Proxmox - In one of my previous jobs, we switched our server (running 6 VMs) from VirtualBox to Proxmox and oh my. Stability and performance dramatically improved. The best thing we ever did!
- Docker - Just Dockerize all the things!
Visual Studio
- Build Vision - Visualise the build process, with proper project breakdowns.
- Intellicode - AI assisted intellisense. That’s right. There is also a post on this here.
- NDepend - Write clean architecture. Lots of amazing metrics, it’s a tool for serious developers!
- Roslynator - A collection of 500+ analyzers, refactorings and fixes for C#. It’s like having an opinionated buddy providing you with real time hints on how to improve your code!
Web Dev
- X-ray by me - Yes it’s my tool but I love it. Quickly visualize the structure (an x-ray) of your webpage. Extremely helpful when you get overlapping elements!
Windows
- Flux - Protect your eyes… Installed on every machine that I own!
- mRemoteNg - Makes RDP viable :). Resizing and manage many connections in a single client.
- Redis Desktop - Open source redis desktop client - try it!
- SearchEverything by Voidtools - Instant search for all files on your system (by instant I mean instant). For extra awesomeness, keymap it to CTRL + ALT + F, and instantly start searching!
- Snipping Tools - Built into windows, amazing way to quickly take a screen shot (it always surprises me how many users are unaware of this)
- ScreenToGif - When a screenshot is not enough, make a gif.
- T-Clock - I’m a big fan of the smaller taskbar. However, smaller taskbars removes dates, which for me made it unusable. T-Clock solves the problem!
- Winmerge - Select two files, right click and compare! Awesome little tool, fastest way to quickly compare two files.