5 developer tools to boost productivity

A developer’s workflow must be uninterrupted to ensure the quality of code is not affected, but it’s hardly ever without potential interruptions and context switches. Fortunately, developer tools can help programmers maintain consistent flow states. These productivity tools allow developers to create more productive workflows.

Here we list the best productivity tools for developers picked by expert software engineers at Talent500.

1. Tuple: Productivity tool for remote pair programming 

Collaboration apps like Zoom or Slack might be appropriate for team meetings and project discussions, but for remote pair programming, they fail to provide the much-needed workflow sync. Tuple is a dedicated developer tool explicitly designed for pair programming.

It features a pair programming-focused screen sharing UI and the ability to control remote machines on low-latency connections. Tuple is one of the best developer tools to work for remote programmers to collaborate when writing code. It offers a 5k-quality video stream, HD quality audio, and efficient CPU usage. For comparison, an average Tuple call uses fewer CPU resources than Chrome when it sits idle.

2. Codestream: Easy code-level discussion

One important task that boosts productivity is effortless knowledge sharing between developers when working on a project. A developer must work outside his bubble and ensure that others know what their code does or what changes they’ve made. Such communication is essential for streamlining team workflows and producing valuable work.

Codestream is a productivity tool that captures all the discussions around code and makes it effortless to do code reviews. Codestream can work with any IDE and supports every programming language, which is why any developer can use it. One of the distinguishing features of this developer tool is that it allows discussion on a code without ever requiring a pull request. All you have to do is to highlight a code block and add a comment. Codestream strengthens the quality of your code base by allowing live discussion within the production environment.

3. f.lux: For giving your eyes a break

Programming can be unforgiving to your eyes and hamper your productivity if you write code for long stretches without giving your eyes a break. f.lux offers a solution to help developers reduce eye strain when writing code in dim light or at night. The tool intelligently adapts your screen’s display color according to different times of the day to ensure that your eyes are not overly strained.

f.lux works on all operating systems – Windows, Linux, Mac, and iOS devices. To set up f.lux, you need to tell the tool what kind of lighting you are working in and where you live; the rest the tool will handle automatically. It is a fully customizable developer tool that can be adjusted to fit your work routine.

4. Lightrun: Automate logs

Bugs are unavoidable for developers; no matter how well planned and impressively coded software is, it will eventually encounter bugs. The most time-consuming activity of fixing bugs is tracking the logs to replicate the bug. While it is an essential step to fix a problem, manually tracking log files is tedious. When there are no logs, things get more complicated, and reproducing the bug becomes much more difficult without enough information.

Thankfully, Lightrun is here to help developers add logs, metrics, and traces to the code base directly into the IDE or CLI in real-time. It provides the capability to developers to have code-level observability without deploying the code to a live environment. This saves much time that is wasted on testing the code after deployment. Lightrun works on monolith microservices, Kubernetes, Docker Swarms, serverless, ECS, Big Data works, and more.

5. Asana: For team and project management

Asana is one of the most widely used workplace management tools. It is utilized for streamlining communication across companies and teams. Developers are benefited from using Asana as it allows them to break down projects into tasks and set clear goals for teams. It can be integrated with hundreds of other productivity tools such as Google Drive, Outlook, and Slack. Customizing its features allows developers to change Asana per their project requirements.

Asana is one of the best productivity tools to improve communication within development teams. Analyzing and monitoring project issues eliminates the constant need for meetings, email updates, and memos. It offers customizable dashboards; activity feeds, prioritization, email integration, focus mode and individual task lists, custom calendars, notifications, and more.

Conclusion

For developers, focus and maintained workflow is critical. We hope these productivity tools can help you avoid distractions and help you manage time and tasks much more efficiently. Developers can improve code quality, collaboration, and project management. For more productivity hacks, check out this article.

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