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Ask HN: What are some of useful but little-known tools you use for development?

by tzz on 1/11/17, 5:46 PM with 9 comments

• by zo1 on 1/11/17, 5:52 PM

  Code generation is a big one for me. A nice thing I like doing is defining "interfaces" for a particular database table, along with the tables definition in a particular format. Then I can generate any kind of access to that table I'm willing to spend time on creating a generator for.

  I'm still hoping to find a decent "SQL flavor" interpreter and/or translator. That would be a killer feature, allowing me to define "procs" in vanilla ANSI SQL, and translate them into whatever database's SQL format I need without worrying too-much about syntax and optimizing. Because you know, it's 2016, and I still need to know that fetching N rows of results from a table has multiple syntax forms depending on your chosen database and version.

• by seanwilson on 1/11/17, 7:19 PM

  Wraith is super useful for web development on existing complex sites and I rarely hear of it or existing tools. Setup a staging site along with your production site, list the important URLs and when you run Wraith it'll compare screenshots of changes between the URLs on staging and production. This lets you update existing pages and verify you've not broken other pages with only a small amount of setup.

  See https://github.com/BBC-News/wraith

• by Jtsummers on 1/12/17, 5:47 PM

  tup [0]. It's a build system. Very fast, plays well with git (can automatically add generated artifacts to your .gitignore file(s)). I only use it for stuff at home, but it's worked very well for me. A few gotchas and a bit too esoteric to introduce to my office (make is everywhere, have to deal with other developers in other companies, migraine inducing IT bureaucracy). The main thing keeping me from using it more is that most of my home stuffs (these days) are straight rust and rust has its own build system (with cargo) that works well enough.

  tup only rebuilds the parts that need to be rebuilt. The build files you produce are dependency trees, it can recognize when a node in the tree hasn't changed and won't trigger further actions. Consider: You modify the comments in your .c source file, correcting a typo from "alpabetical" to "alphabetical". There has been no code change. Make will, without additional configurations, build the .o file, and then rebuild everything else down the line to the final lib or exe. tup will recognize, by default, that the .o file is unaltered, and won't trigger any further action.

  tup also has a monitoring system that I intended to port to OS X but got distracted on. It will watch the filesystem for changes so it doesn't need to walk the filetree to identify the change when you issue the build command. It'll already know exactly what has changed and be ready to issue the (near-)optimal instructions.

  [0] http://gittup.org/tup/

• by itamarst on 1/11/17, 9:55 PM

  - pex is really nice for packaging up Python applications: https://pex.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

  - Eliot, a project of mine, is a logging system for Python that actually gives you a concept of causality: http://eliot.readthedocs.io/en/0.12.0/introduction.html

• by cdvonstinkpot on 1/11/17, 10:26 PM

  When you don't want/need full-blown fail2ban:

  https://github.com/sofar/tallow