Useful tools for coders #001

I don't document my work as a web developer, software engineer, coder, dev, geek, or whatever you want to call me, but I spend my days immersed in JavaScript code and occasionally other programming languages. I thought it would be helpful to use Hive to keep track of the tools I use, as others might find it interesting or useful. So, I'll share some valuable references I've discovered recently or that have been shared with me.

My findings

Val Town

https://www.val.town/ was recommended to me by my colleague and fellow Front End Developer, Colin. In a nutshell it is reminiscent of Github's "Gists" where you can share small snippets of code with others or just capture ideas for a rainy day. However you can't execute Gists but with Val Town you can, you can even schedule your functions via Cron jobs. This looks interesting and I've not had any time to try it out but take a look at the video where they demonstrate what it does.

Tailscale

https://tailscale.com/ Tailscale connects your team's devices and development environments for easy access to remote resources. One that I am going to check out in more depth as time allows. Most notable for me is the possibility of setting up a custom/bespoke VPN or establishing a "home lab". Again, thanks to Colin for this one.

Blogster (Astro template)

https://github.com/flexdinesh/blogster is a good replacement for my existing https://nicklewis.blog website's theme, that I've not updated for awhile. There are a lot of these static website tools around these days from Gatsby to Eleventy for JS fans, not to forget Hugo, Jekyll and so on for Ruby-on-rails folks.

Find all CSS colours in your codebase

https://nesin.io/blog/find-all-css-color-used-vs-code came in handy yesterday as we needed to do this at work, when someone asked us, "What colours do we use on the site?". Dumped the results of this to a text file and sent it their way, sniggering to ourselves in the process.