As we did last year, we'd like to share tools we found useful in 2016. This is by no means a comprehensive list, simply some of the highlights.
Ripgrep
by: Julio Monteiro
In the beginning, there was grep. Then ack, a pure Perl script that made searching faster compared to grep. A few years ago we got The Silver Searcher (ag), a tool built with C namely faster (and "33% sorter") than ack. Finally this year, ripgrep (rg) was launched, built with Rust and until this point the faster command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets around.
Other than being fast, its regular expression engine uses finite automata and guarantees linear time searching. Searching across huge code repositories is fun again. At Doximity, searching across all our private code repositories takes less than a single second. Give it a try, I'm sure you're going to like it.
Giphy Capture
by: Ben Fischer
Giphy Capture is a tool to take your pull requests to the next level. Make a 20 second recording and embed it right into the PR description. This helps reviewers understand the intention of your change faster. If anyone does a git blame in the future and comes back to your pull they'll see with their own eyes that your code was working. Alternatively you can also use LICEcap mentioned next.
LICEcap
by: Jaymes Waters
Licecap is a dead simple gif creator. It records & saves a gif from a selected area of your desktop. It has been an invaluable tool to create quick, simple animations to share with product managers, quality assurance & other developers.
Re:dash
by: Mujtaba Badat
Anyone that spends a lot of time analyzing data knows how much of a pain it is to organize queries, build visualizations, and keep those visualizations fresh. Re:dash does all of that and more by allowing you to write SQL and turn it into shareable dashboards. Key metrics are the compass that guide entire teams in the murky waters of developing new products. By making dashboards easy for everyone, re:Dash helps teams never lose sight of what matters most.
Devdocs.io
by: Marcus Derencenius
DevDocs is a web app that provides documentation for many languages and frameworks. The kicker is that it provides offline support. It is super fast and gets updated frequently.
What tools did you adopt in 2016 that helped you get work done? Follow us @dox_engineering if you'd like to be notified about updates to this blog.
