Cool and handy web development / product management tools — 2019
As a technical product manager and/or web developer, you face plenty of small challenges every day. Many times, cool and smart tiny tools can help to make your life a whole lot better.
Here comes a list of things that I have included to my toolset in the last months.
Visual Studio Code
Let’s start with the most boring one. It’s not new to my list, but this year, I re-fell in love with it in a big way.
Visual Studio Code is free and works on almost all systems.
It might not be the cool hack itself, but it comes with a quite open setup, which lets you include tons of helpful extensions. Just search medium and you will find many articles, that introduce the maybe best ones. But even beside the fancy ones, it is already extremely helpful to simply have an IDE that adapts to all kinds of languages and stacks.
Uptime Robot
This cool service basically lets you monitor your webpages (or servers) and sends you an alert if one of them goes offline.
This is extremely helpful, but here is another thought: You can easily use this as some kind of a Cron Job tool. At least if you want to trigger it regularly (like every 10 minutes). For this, you do not even need to pay, since it is freemium. However, if you are working on a company project, the pro plan provides you with even more features.
G Suite Toolbox Dig
Here comes a handy tool from Google!
There, you can easily (and fast) look up pubic server entries for any domain.
Especially cool, if you want to check, if some recent DNS changes are visible to the public (even if not fully processed by all parties yet).
RemoveBg
Ever needed to remove the background of an image? Could be very time consuming. This SaaS tool does in seconds, what before, you’ve needed hours.
Just try it!
Favicon Generator
I always struggle with this one. favicon-generator.org seems to be the most stable one. realfavicongenerator.net, however, brings in some more features, such as Safari pinned tab icon.
I would recommend using both and pick the best mixture for your project.
GooFonts
Google Webfonts are cool, but the library has become huge!
GooFonts helps a lot to find what you are looking for.
Google WebFonts Helper
You might have found the font, which you were looking for. But how to implement it without using the Google CDN? Even there are no judgements yet, some lawyers say, that you are not allowed to use Google’s CDN here without the user’s permission (in the EU, due to GDPR). And therefore, even some AdBlocker might block your font.
You need to download them and include it directly. Tricky, since Google does not really support this and even sends different files via the CDN, depending on your browser, device, …
Google WebFonts Helper comes to your help. Just select the Google Webfont you like and download. It even helps you with the implementation.
SVG Minifier
SVG images are great. But how to compress them? If you look into their code (they are basically XML files), you usually find a lot of unnecessary information. Of course, you can strip them out manually, but why no tool?
QRCode Monkey
You need to generate a QR-Code? Ideally as SVG? Free?
Check out this awesome tool.
Security Headers
Security headers became a thing in recent times. Not because there would be any new exploits and attacks (maybe some are quite new), but because at least some people care about security a little more.
Please close those doors, if possible!
This cool website not only tests your page, but also provides great advice about how and why.
SSL-Converter
Speaking about security, yes, you should have an SSL certificate in place. Not only for security reasons, but also for SEO and because (at least in the EU) you can get easily sued nowadays.
When moving certificates over different webservers and infrastructures, you might need to convert them from one to another format. For example, Microsoft Azure requires PFX, which often is not at hand.
This tool helps you to get this handled.
Mind that this is not the most secure way, but the page also provides advice to do it locally with OpenSSL.
Pingdom Tools
Need to ping a webpage and also get some performance insights — but you need to get it fast, on the run?
Have a look at this beautiful website.
StackEdit — Markdown
Markdown is cool, but I still often don’t get it right.
StackEdit is an editor that helps you to do better.
RegEx101
Even more frustrating is, of course, RegEx. I struggled with it for years, until I found this cool tool.
It not only helps you to validate your rules, but does so in a way, you really start to actually learn it.
Just awesome!
Calendly
You need to organize appointments and are getting really frustrated over the tons of emails and calls to get it done?
Calendly is a great tool to do better.
Just tell the tool, how you want to get your meetings planned. With a minimum time in between slots (very helpful!), a max amount per day, and more. (Actually, that and the ease of use sets Calendly apart of its competition at the moment.)
Then, let other people book a slot and it gets directly put into your calendar.
It is freemium, but for simple cases, the free version works just fine.
DeepL
Translation can be a tough thing. DeepL is a translator, which learned from tons of multilanguage website to really translate in a more natural way.
At the moment, it beats even Google Translate (my second best).
That’s it for 2019.
I hope you found something interesting. If not, let’s wait for the 2020 edition! :)
