Immortalising The Tools I Cannot Live Without

30 May 2025

“A poor workman blames his tools, but a great one knows how to choose them wisely.”

Just FYI - I use a Mac.

Package Managers

Shell

Version Control

Code Editor

  • VSCode - Has plenty of nice extensions

Languages

Whiteboarding

  • Excalidraw — I like the seamless drawing experience, great for quick prototyping and system design demos

Database GUI

  • Studio 3T - I use this for MongoDB, it offers a feature-rich UI
  • MongoDB Compass - An alternative to above
  • Medis — For viewing Redis DB
  • DataGrip - Versatile, requires separate driver installations for specific databases, mainly used this to manage SQL databases
  • MySQL Workbench - Not as great as DataGrip, but more straightforward to set up

API Testing

  • Postman — A standard must-have for testing API calls
  • Bruno — Nice alternative to above, has git integration

Containers

  • Docker Desktop — Nice GUI for playing around with images and containers

Misc