Services and Tools I use for Developing

Here is a list of services and tools that I use while developing apps. I plan on writing more detailed setup and usage of most of these services in the future

Nodejs/Express

Ahh, good old Node. The vast majority of my projects that require a backend are created with node. For some of the smaller projects that require a handful of endpoints, I use Netlify’s lambda feature.

Yarn

My package manager of choice. There are three reasons as to why I prefer to use this over npm

1. Offline support
2. Clean console output
3. Lightning fast due to package caching.

React

React is my baby, its my go to for any project I code that needs a frontend. Some of my favorite frameworks/boilerplates

1. Create React App- for small/simple projects
2. Razzle/Afterjs- Any project where server side rendering is needed.
3. GatsbyJS - Static site generator. The website you’re viewing now was built with GatsbyJS

Netlify

Hosting platform of choice for static sites. Free hosting and they offer a slew of free add ons such as AWS style functions, authentication, form handling and CI/CD.

MongoDB

Fast and easy database service to set up. You can set it up as a service locally, run as a regular program when needed or host it in the cloud with Mlabs(third party) or Atlas

Auth0

This is a gem. Auth0 makes authentication stupidly easy and the pricing is affordable. They offer a generous free tier that I have yet to break out of. The only time you need to get out of the free tier is if you have over 7000 monthly users or need an enterprise service such as active directory. After working on an app using passport, I have seen and loved all the time I saved with Auth0.

Algolia

Balls to the walls fast search platform. Another service that has a generous free tier. Algolia performs constant indexing on your database and delivers near instant search speeds. They can even index several keys in each object you add. Check out the search on this site, its built using Algolia’s free tier

Github

Where I store all my code. I currently have no positive or negative feelings towards Github. I mostly use it due to Github student offering 4 years worth of private repos for free. I may swap to Gitlab soon due to them offering something similar just so I can try it out

Atom

Text editor of choice. It almost comes perfect right out the box, the only package I have installed is Atom-Beautify. Beautify is just a way to clean up your code files and make the files a lot more readable.

GitKraken

10/10 Git gui. Nice way to visually see an entire projects Git history visually. I also use this to handle any pull/push/commits I need to make.

Bear

Perfect simple and advanced note taker. Think Word/Pages having a baby with Notepad/Notes and you get bear. Powerful organization features, exports to almost all formats including markdown. I use this to write all of my blog post in.