We're constantly adding new developer tools to StackShare, and we like to take a look back on the most popular ones at the end of the month. These are the tools added in April 2018 that were the most favorited, commented on, and/or added to Stacks.
Every frontend engineer knows that reproducing JavaScript errors can be a nightmare. Rather than sifting through call stacks and error logs to figure out what went wrong, RootCause automatically notifies you via Slack or email when an unhandled exception occurs and records user interaction, Ajax requests, console logs and more. You can even watch a video replay of the user session that led to the bug!
If you're not very familiar with the D programming language, I don't blame you. It ranks just above COBOL on the TIOBE Index. However, it has a small, but passionate userbase who praise it for being a more product C-like language with powerful metaprogramming features. Diamond is a full-stack web framework for D developers AKA people who want to write code with the productivity of Python and speeds closer to C.
Here's another one for all you frontend developers out there. Blocked by waiting for the backend folks to push a change to the API? Not anymore. MOCKtastic allows you to easily create offline mock API servers and share them with your entire team. The best part is it's not limited to JSON. You can serve up plaintext, HTML, XML, JSON or even static files.
Watch out, Hugo, there's a hot new static-site generator on the block. And this one's powered by the smokin' hot Vue.js team. Why should you switch from your current tool of choice? Well, that depends on how much you like Vue. VuePress allows you to use Vue components inside your Markdown and create custom themes with Vue. "Yo dawg, we heard you like Vue..."
Stripe has made many a developer's life easier with their payments API. Now they've released a new set of tools specifically for billing. Developers can use the billing API to "design fully customized subscription logic and pricing models," and business people can easily create subscription and invoicing systems with zero code.
If you're looking for a "fast, open source Slack desktop app", you're in luck. Wey is a brand new Slack client built on top of the Yue library. While they don't exactly say it's faster than the official desktop app, that certainly seems to be the goal - along with future support for other chat service providers. The creators strongly caution you to not use this for work yet, though! There could still be some bugs that cause you to miss messages.
Everybody's got secrets - especially developers. Now there's a place to manage, distribute and rotate your app secrets on AWS. If you're managing database credentials, there's built-in integration for Amazon RDS for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Aurora. You can also use the service for API keys, OAuth tokens, and more.
Sorry backend folks, this one's been stacked with tools for frontend devs. Solis is a "live design output" tool for macOS that plugs into your favorite text editor. Real-time, multi-viewport previews of HTML, CSS, SCSS, and LESS, as you write it? Yeah, it's got that. Oh, and you can even use WebKit Developer Tools right inside the app.
How does on-demand image processing sound? How about content aware image resizing, cropping, compression, caching, and delivery? The coolest feature of ImageBoss, IMO, is the ability to request an image with custom dimensions and have it intelligently cropped for you to fit in any part of your app. The pricing is pretty sweet too.
This one is a business tool, but we decided to include it, because it's probably going to result in developers spending less time helping out marketing and more time coding features. Indemandly bills itself as "Typeform meets Intercom" and introduces a new way to convert website visitors with contextual "contact flows". It's kind of like a chatbot mixed with a scheduler mixed with a survey widget... or just "Typeform meets Intercom".
Any data scientists still reading this? Good, because this one's pretty cool. Comet is a collaboration tool that works with your existing machine learning libraries, like Tensorflow or Keras. You can track code, experiments, and results, and share them with everyone on your team. Not only that, but it's free for open source projects.
