There are possible tangents, interruptions and background changes in the workflow of developers. But the nature of programming makes access to and maintenance of uninterrupted flow critical. Fortunately, a ton of digital tools can help developers do just that – working to protect their space for deep thinking and creating more productive workflows. Here’s our selection of the best productivity tools for developers as of 2020.
Dewo – for accessing, maximizing, and staying in your flow
Distractions and context change are the two largest adversaries of the developer – making it impossible to concentrate on complex solving of problems. As your “personal dedicated assistant,” Dewo will help you protect your focus and make every working day more quality. With AI, Dewo can help you understand your performance, and provide competency information to improve the way you work. You can evaluate your production patterns with AI.
It also actively protects your focus beyond intelligent analysis. It silences all app notifications automatically and updates your Slack status when entering a flow condition, creating a protective force surface. It also provides intelligent planning for meetings and takes into account the productive designs of your team to plan meetings that actively protect spaces for focused work.
Tuple – for advanced remote pair programming
Take a look at Tuple if you are sick to try to work with remote developers via Zoom or Slack. It is a specially designed tool for programming pairs and therefore provides a well-known screen-sharing interface and the ability to control a low latency remote machine. As the brainchild of three detailed developers, you can enjoy a quality 5K video stream, clever audio, reliable BUI and effective CPU usage – with the average Tuple call using less CPU than when Chrome is idle.
Timely – for automatically tracking all your work
Timely helps developers with minimum effort to gain control of their time by automatically capturing everything you work on. It records the time you spend on a private timeline in each web and desktop application and gives you an account of your work. How long you spend actively coding, managing tickets and commitments, communicating about projects, and organizing work, and how long you have spent managing them.
Designed to never interrupt your flow, it removes manual timers and notes completely in good time. Its IP can even translate all your business data into precise time sheets for you and externalize a further business task with low value. Dashboards for your project and team provide rapid performance breakdowns, so there is nothing you need to dig for. See how long you spend on different tasks, how much you earn, how distracted you get and how you work with your weekly capacity.
Codestream – for easily sharing code-level knowledge
In addition to an uninterrupted focus, the efficient sharing of knowledge is essential to productivity development. In order to produce valuable work, it is crucial to streamline workflows and activities across your own bubble. Fortunately, Codestream takes effort and frustration out of code reviews for all your discussions about code.
With Codestream, you can talk to a team about code without using a pull request to support each programming language. Just highlight a block of code and enter a comment to help resolve the problem intuitively. By allowing developers to directly discuss code in the environment, Codestream helps to solve problems regularly in the productive group – which will ultimately strengthen the quality of the codebase.
f.lux – for giving your eyes a break
Programming can become intensive in your eyes quickly, so you have to code responsibly to sustain long productive work stretches. F.lux helps to solve one element in the evening as a tool designed to reduce visual tension. The display colours are intelligently adapted to compliment various times of the day, working across Windows, Linux, Mac and iOS systems.
You simply have to say what type of illumination you have and where you live and it will automatically handle the rest. If sunset is detected, f.lux will simulate your display’s indoor light, and adjust the set-up to sunlight settings if it detects Sunrise. All can be adjusted to fit your workflow to choose colours that help you to stay alert.
Walrus.ai – automate your QA testing
Check out Walrus.ai if you want to save money and effort when testing your code. It promises a more efficient, lightweight solution for in-house automated tests or manual QA, by providing full end-to – end testing via a single API call. You just have a walrus.ai CLI to write and send the test. Walrus.ai will then translate your instructions and construct an automated test model, resulting in minutes.
You ‘re wondering how reliable the results are? Well, until your app changes the automated model runs, and the Walrus team monitors any process to detect false positive and false negative. You then reconstruct the model and send you the right result. It can be plugged into your CI / CD pipelines and pricing plans are available to meet different testing requirements.
Pi-hole – for network-wide ad blocking
In addition to being intrusive and dizzy, website ads can hamper your screen, reduce network performance and cause unnecessary distractions. Pi-hole is available for those looking for a more comprehensive solution to the problem. It offers network-wide ad blocking by connecting to your router instead of simply offering a web plugin. You can protect every device from distracting ads by combining it with a VPN. It provides long-term statistics as a next-level ad blocker to help you see what happens on your network over time.
Rainy Mood – Rain Sounds for Sleep & Study
You can try a simple noise generator if you work in an open office but find any sort of music that distracts you from listening through your headphones. A soothing sound from falling rain is a straightening choice for Rainy Mood.
This noise generator offers you endless rain and thunder, which helps you to concentrate and avoid distraction from the office chat. The website offers another musician every day, but you can ignore this option, as well as the falling rain.
You can listen or experiment on Android or iOs devices with additional features directly on the website. The telephone application provides you with four rain scenes: Countryside, Ocean, Café and Classic scene.
Clockify – a working hours tracker
It is essential to track the time you spend on various programs and there is no better way to do so than to have efficient and free time tracking software.
Clockify is mainly a working hours tracker that helps you monitor your project time, obtain data showing how productive you are (weekly, monthly or annually), and calculate the hours you spend and payroll.
Easy to track and with only one click can be completed. Just type in and start the timer. Type it. When you have finished clicking, timer listed your coding activities.
At the end of the day you can also add time and fill the timesheet manually so that you know how much time you spent on each project.
You will then analyze how much time you spent in reports on each project.
To make work more interesting (and more likely to hold your focus), Clockify can also help you gamify the process of coding. Just set estimates for each task, track time for them, and try to beat the estimated time in a race against the clock.
If you’re a Mac user, you can implement the Pomodoro technique and make use of Clockify Pomodoro timer, which you can choose in the apps’ preferences. With this timer, you can set break time (considered important by various studies) and work time, and let the system remind you when it’s time to focus on each.
Habitica – Track the progress of your daily coding tasks
Applications which allow you to create to do lists will help you track the progress of your daily coding tasks, and that is something entirely new for Habitica.
Actually this app treats your daily workload as an RPG game to upgrade to complete your tasks. You can also find animals, collect coins and equipment as you progress with your work, and so there is an incentive system for driving you forward.
Once you sign in, you first have to create a character. You can then indicate:
- daily tasks – the ones you have to finish everyday
- to-dos – the tasks you only have to complete once
- habits – everyday activities you perform, either good or bad. If you pursue your good habits, you gain rewards. If you pursue your bad habits, you lose health and mana
Your character suffers damage unless you complete your tasks within a certain period.
If your code in a team, the guilds and group research of Habitica can be tried. You can combine all your project activities with a group search and the tasks of the team member. If you delay and stop doing your own work, the characters of your team member also suffer, so you can learn to be responsible for your share of the work.
