All the software development tools your coworkers (didn’t) tell you about

The first time someone asked me about my dev experience, I didn’t know what they meant. I made myself click things, type lots of words, and overall just make my dev life worse because.. well, no one told me these things! Here are a bunch of tools that will help you up your dev life. Some might say, it is a software engineering starter pack.

1. Ignore git mistakes with the fuck. Scenario: You want to push a branch to the master branch for your workplace. The flow is you create a new branch, name it, and do some work on it, and then push the branch up to show your coworkers what you’ve done. You type: git push.. and you get a computer that yells at you (because you didn’t set up an upstream branch for that in your local computer). You type “fuck!” and the terminal pops up with what you needed to do, and all you have to do is POP! Press enter. It types in the correct command with the correct branch name you wanted to push. Yay!

2. Up your terminal with iterm2 → My favorite feature so far is the hot key addition. It’s an alright experience to set up, mostly just graphical clicking and then reading a little bit to understand what a hot key is. It is very satisfying and I highly recommend to set it up if you have not yet!

My hot key window on “tab” comes up from the top of the window and is very fun! It’s like a friend.

3. Get your color on with zsh. Customizing color scheme (which is most important to me) was kind of hard to figure out, as you don’t really know what setting is pertaining to what in the terminal, but their built in stuff is good. My boyfriend helped me change the theme to “ys” via the .zshrc file and to Solarized Dark. I am happy with it. Final product has been what you’re seeing!

Way better than just a regular white Terminal, which is what I was using for a good few months on the job. hahah

Here are some other tips I learned today- also very important but not for the terminal!

1. command T command W for opening tabs on Chrome and closing tabs on Chrome. I don’t know why I didn’t do this before. I will never click the button ever again.
2. fzf — Fuzzy Finder! Command R to search all commands you’ve entered in your Terminal. Also, `code $(fzf)` lets you fuzzy find to open up the file in VSCode so you don’t have to cd into the directory to open it up in VSCode.

And that’s it for nifty tricks! I hope this helps someone out there. :) What’s your favorite dev tool?