5 Tools That Make Me a Better Software Developer

The tools of the trade…

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Every skilled craftsman needs the right tools to do their job well. Software developers are no exception. Here are my top five tools that help me do work and boost my productivity.

JetBrains IDEs

Throughout my career, I have switched back and forth between several different IDEs. Over the past year and a half, I have stuck pretty consistently with just using JetBrains IDEs. I use WebStorm for React projects, Ryder for .NET core projects, PyCharm for Python projects, and IntelliJ for Java projects.

For most of my software development career, I have been a consultant which means I am switching projects and programming languages fairly regularly. With a JetBrains subscription, I get a development tool for each language which not only gives me a place to write code but also tells me how I can write better code.

For years I used ReSharper with Visual Studio on Windows machines for .NET projects, but I have exclusively worked on Macs for the past few years. There is now Visual Studio for Mac, but the drawback is there is no ReSharper plugin for the Mac version.

That’s why I use Ryder now because it works on Mac and has ReSharper built into it. If you aren’t familiar with ReSharper it is a tool that analyzes…