Tools are an essential part of every engineer’s life. You might not need each of them everyday but having a ready to use toolkit will make your life easy in unimaginable ways. Over the time, I have tried many tools. Some work for me, most do not. However, the ones that do work for me shape the way I do my day-to-day work. Tools are therefore an integral part of my work. These days, I have been frequently changing machines myself and the challenge to recall / install each tool feels like a irritating task to me.
Today, my friend, Gunjan Vora asked me about tools that I would install on my first day at office and I found it as a nice opportunity to braindump my ideal toolkit. These might be (or might not be) useful to you. However, these are some good beauties that I have discovered after investing a good time in tool exploration.
Here goes my list:
- Browser Extensions
- Grammarly – Helps me look literate.
- Wordtune – Helps me look educated.
- Dualless – If I need to use a system with single screen only)
- Adblock Plus – Saves me from free advertisement (noise
- Vimium – Power Browsing / Time Saver
- Magical Text Expansion – Power Typing / Writing
- Session Management – Save Tabs with Project / Purpose. One Click Opener.
- SelectorsHub – Web Testing Made Easy
- Bug Magnet – Exploratory Testing Assistant
- Go Full Page – Save your Pages (Full)
- Fake Filler – Free, Fake, Random Form Filler
- Exploratory Testing Extension – Note Taker
- UX Check – UX Guidewords / Heuristics
- Desktop Apps:
- Everything – Helps me search everything in seconds
- Canva – Design, Illustrations, Visuals, & Posters in minutes.
- AutoHotKey – Script Windows (Power Stuff)
- XMind – If you know me, You know what XMind is 🙂 If you don’t, I recommend you to Google!
- Caffeine – Don’t let your computer sleep, before you do 🙂
- Krisp – If you want others to hear you crystal clear 🙂 Also, If you want to hear others, crystal clear.
- WSL – Who doesn’t need Linux? What was so interesting about the 90s?
- Zoom It – STOP looking for the zoom button on apps, Just Zoom It 🙂
- Carnac – What the hell did you do to do that? It shows everything! Power tool for remote workers.
- Greenshot – Screenshot Ninja
- Screenrec – Video Ninja
- LiceCap – Smart GIF Recorder
- Github Desktop – If you know Git, You know Github 🙂
This list only contains the installable tools, I use a lot of other web app tools too. A post on that some other day. You can find many more useful tools in the Ultimate Productivity Toolkit.
I am thinking to automate the installation process for all of these. If you have ideas, Please help me know 🙂
Signing Off 🙂