Developer Tools That Transform Habits for Smarter Development

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season when we are getting our mic out of the way for those who are watching this and we are building better habits, building better developers. This is Developer Nord podcast. I am Rob Broadhead. I am one of the founders of Developer Nord, not like Mike who's just toasting us on the other side. Well, you can't see this. This is all audio, but you could check us out on the video side. Slight tangent. Okay, so I am also a founder of RB Consulting, where we help you manage technology. We help you get the most out of it. This is something like, things like your big purchases of life are things like a house and a car, maybe a boat and a big software system because if you're a business, that's a lot of where your stuff goes, a lot of where your money and resources and time and you sort of bet on those things. So we help you through integration, simplification, automation. We find ways to take what you have, craft it into a custom unique solution for you so you can get the most out of it and do the most for your customers. As we're continuing our challenges, I know it's a broken record, but those pomodoros, just throwing a couple in there and making sure that you use those on a regular basis has been huge for me. It's really been something that's allowed me to just really focus on stuff. Another one that I'm finding that it was a little bit more challenging to get into because I had a lot of other things going on is the branding thing. I think doing just a little bit of self-branding stuff, 10, 15 minutes a day even of like, a little blog post, reviewing a site, something like that. You may see some of the fruits of this because I actually went back out and dug up some stuff for the developer site. Some of the things that we were, that had been on my list, I think literally for two or three years, it was like, oh yeah, I'll get to it. So I got to it. Those kinds of things are really helpful to just like keep you thinking about your business and not get too stuck working in your business instead of on your business. One thing, bad thing is this is like a very microcosm of stuff, but working out yesterday, playing handball, great time, did great, awesome, winning. And then the bad, that was a good thing. It was a great day, good workout, all that kind of stuff. The bad thing is at one point my partner and I were not on the same page and I ended up basically punching one finger into his fist and he's not a small guy. Long story short, it hurt a lot. I don't know if you can see here that there's like a, there's a, whoops, there, whoop, I got to get my, like, there's like a nice little like discolored here and swollen and all that kind of good stuff. See, this is why you should watch, listen to and watch our YouTube channel. But also that would be an opportunity for you to get to see Michael laughing at all the stupid stuff I do. Mike, go ahead and introduce yourself. Hey everyone. My name is Michael Malosh, one of the co-founders and developer. Also the founder of Envision QA, where we offer a plethora of services, be it from quality assurance, software development, quality controls. We are essentially your go-to when you are struggling with your software projects. Either it's a new project you want to get off the ground and not sure where to begin, or if you're struggling to get your software to a state where your customers are happy, where you're not crashing every day. We will help you analyze your software, build the testing tools you need to make sure that your software runs smoothly and your customers are happy. Let's see, goals. Pomodoro, doing pretty good with that. Still about two, three of those a day running into the habits still, bad habits still of taking a break in between. Like I'm doing 25, 25, 25. I need to shorten it up just a little bit. Working on that. However, unfortunately, when you're working on software, you can kind of go heads down and you get like once you get on the roll, you're kind of stuck in a roll and it's not really fruit in to take a break. So good and bad on that. So kind of good and bad. Good. Had a wonderful day. Project kicked off. Things are going smooth. Bad side today, I just kind of had one of those days of everything melted down. It's like I, nothing seemed to be going right. And reset, doing a little bit better now, but it just was kind of a roller coaster kind of day. So, you know, we're hoping everybody else's roller coaster will be going on the upswing now as they're listening to us. And what we want to talk about this time is sort of to me, this is an upswing kind of opportunity or topic. We're talking about tools. And one of the habits that I think are very valuable to developers and that I think we don't, we really underestimate them. I don't think we value them to the level that we do is how we can bring our expertise into recommending tools and utilizing tools that are not technology. So, you know, yes, we, everybody would say, yeah, if I need to know what's the right IDE, I'm going to talk to my developer pal and stuff like that. And they're going to talk like that in a very deep voice. But then there's all these other countless, like just even if you just talk to the industries, there's countless industries of tools that are out there. When you think of things like there's customer relationship management stuff and enterprise management and just bug tracking, ticket tracking, issue tracking, lists, productivity tools, connection tools, email, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, just tons of them. And it is very valuable for us to spend some time thinking through these, evaluating these. Now, some, it is very much a resume enhancer or can be for you. For example, if you spend some time and you understand how to, let's say you're just a, we'll call it general purpose developer, like maybe you do Java, you do C sharp or Python or PHP or something like that, then it is very valuable for you to also know enough to, for example, integrate with Salesforce or NetSuite or the database sides, maybe like, Oracle financials or Microsoft's dynamics and some of those kinds of things. But also even smaller tool, we'll call them smaller tools, no offense, to like your MailChimp and HubSpot and QuickBooks, QuickBooks Online, those kinds of things. It is very useful for us to understand and spend some time in these tools. There is a whole industry, we interviewed a guy not too long ago, okay, a couple of years ago now, that his whole business was based on customizing Asana. And there's things like that, that there are these niches that are out there that are sometimes based or surrounding, you know, work around a specific tool or set of tools. It is very helpful for us to spend some time keeping up with the Joneses, we'll say, but keeping up with what's out there. Now, as building a habit, one of the things that I found that's useful is this is not so much a daily task, although we're going to turn it into one because that's part of the challenge. It's not so much a daily task, but to me it is more, I feel, I think it's best described as seasonal. There will be times that there will be a certain flavor of products that I'm going to be interested in, that I'm going to do some research on and spend some time with. Usually, yes, it's related to a customer or something that they need, or potentially, maybe it's a project that I'm trying to win and I know I need to know a little bit more about this world or this area of projects or these areas of applications. Or even if we're building something custom, because I want to go see what's out there because we're not going to use the word steal, but we'll say repeat with prejudice or something like some of their skill, some of the features and functions that are out there. It's not about the function per se or precisely, as much as what does this type of project, this type of application, this type of product generally need to provide. It's a little bit of a sanity check to make sure that our requirements make sense. It's also a little bit of a, where can we get some germs of ideas that we can build something that's going to be better for our customers? I'll give you something to work with before I pass it on to Michael and let him go all the places he's going to go. One of the things I like to do with these projects is just like learning anything else. This is probably because I'm very much a hands-on, I want to do something with it. I want to apply that knowledge and that helps it sink into my head. A lot of times what I'm going to do is I'm going to take, particularly if I'm looking at multiple applications. Now, maybe I just need one, but I'm going to have a need. For example, let's say, well, we could go back, let's say that in the revamping of the development or stuff, I want to spend some time looking at marketing tools. How can we better, what are there tools out there that we don't use that we could adopt and that will help us with our marketing efforts? Now, thinking through these kinds of things in themselves is a useful exercise because it's like, what the heck would that tool even give me? What does it provide to me? Part of this is building out your little list of like, this is my requirements for this kind of tool. I use this quite often where I've got a core requirements that fit me, my business, my situation. I can take those and with a lot of different applications, I can find ways to apply those. I could go out in this marketing thing and say, okay, well, I want something where I'm going to be able to have a mail list. I want to be able to track customers. I want to be able to track their open rate and maybe have some sort of automated send to my list or maybe multiple lists. Cool. Got a list of stuff. Now, what I want to do is, I hate to say it, but a lot of times I'm going to start with like a Google search. Actually, one of the best things is pick what you know or the product that you have or the one name you know and then go Google products like X or alternatives to X. That will almost always pop up one of the comparison sites. It'll give you like the best 20, you know, mails list software solutions of 2022 or whatever they are. And you find one for this year or close enough to it and start walking through it because usually those are a great way to get started with just a high level point of view of like what is out in this market? What should I be able to talk to my customers about if I'm building something in this realm? What are some things like name dropping I should do to be able to say, well, it's sort of like this or sort of like that. Now, that's the first step. The second step is now I need to go look at those. So when I say it's sort of like this, I actually know what the heck I'm talking about. And it's not just I'm dropping a name, but it's like I've spent a little time on it. Now, this goes back to those requirements. What I usually will do is depending on my timeframe and stuff like that is take my requirements and say to myself or to the room in general, what is it that I could do to prove that I can support, you know, meet some of these requirements in a short period of time, short period of time, maybe an hour, maybe a day, maybe two or three days. But then my goal is to go get, step onto one of those, get one of those applications. Usually you can download a fully functioning version for some period of time. There's some sort of demo or something that will allow you to get used to it, to play around with it as we say. And even if it's one that's like, hey, it's seven days free and then they're going to charge you $4 billion at the end, just make darn sure you cancel that by day four or five. And if they don't allow you, if it's really painful to cancel it, at least you're protecting your customers from being, you know, hit by the same kind of stuff. But it is a challenging thing to do because I have to usually be very focused on like, I have a small period of time, I've got a demo, I've got a lot of products that I want to compare. So I want to like go through this and repeat this process. And I want it to be something that is, by nature, it's going to be a throwaway, even though there have been more than a few times that I've gotten into it and enjoyed working on the product so much that I've been like, I'm going to buy that product or I'm going to start using this. So that is like a really short list of just start with some requirements, go for a search, just find sort of the world of those kinds of things, and then say, all right, I'm going to build a short list, which a lot of times my short list is if they don't have a demo, if they don't have a free demo, then it's out of the list. And so you bring it on down and get down to something that's, you know, even if it's like three to five, that now has allowed you to expand your world of knowledge. And if you're comparing something that you've done before, then maybe one or two of those are things that you've used in the past and you want to see how they've updated. And then the others are going to be some new ones. Now you can compare what I've said to the new guy on the other side of the internet there. What are your thoughts on this or like, and maybe your approaches to it? Sure. So you threw out a whole bunch of different apps and ideas, and I want to start with a simple concept. So if you're going to use tools or apps or anything to try to improve your life or improve your apps, make sure that you first see if there's a demo, play around with it, try it out, you know, kick the tires. You don't want to just say, Hey, I'm going with this tool. And you find out three months down the road that you've spent $300 and the thing doesn't work. Also, once you find a tool that you like, stick with it. Don't, once you find something that works for you, stop. You know, if it works, it's cheap. You don't need to waste any more time trying to kick the wheels and try something else. And finally, avoid tools that add work. So one of the things I found is when you go out and start looking for tools, you start using apps, make sure the app improves your life, not make your life more difficult. One of the best examples I can throw out there is QuickBooks. QuickBooks desktop version. Awesome. QuickBooks online. Total full bar. It is so much additional work to do something in QuickBooks online versus QuickBooks desktop. It's one of those where it's like, okay, I'm going back to this or going to something like WAVE apps, which is free for most of the functionality and we'll get you 90% there. So as you're looking at tools, make sure it does the job you want, make sure it's easy to use and make sure it doesn't make your life more difficult. Now, as developers, we tend to make our lives difficult because when we see a problem, we typically are like, oh, I can write a solution to do that. 90% of what we do as developers have probably already been done before in some frame or fashion. So like if you need to, like a calendar application, well, you have Outlook, you have Google Calendar. There are things out there that may already do what you're trying to accomplish. So do some Googling search, do some research and see if there's something out there that already does it. Maybe there's a free API you can use, some examples you can pull in or an app you can just plug into like Rob said, like MailChimp or SandGrid or something else out there. You can use what's already there. The best example of this is something we looked at years ago. Early on when we were doing another project, we looked at things like Memberly and there were some other social media apps out there for pushing out your notifications to social media. So when you're doing blogs, you always have to do that marketing. You have to push it out. You have to bring in your customers. Well, initially we tried to write our own. We tried to use the APIs for Facebook, LinkedIn, all those fun places. And the problem we ran into a lot was those applications constantly get updated. APIs change, things break, and we're spending so much more time just trying to push our software out than it would be to just literally go to those social media outlets and just post the material ourselves. Then we ran across a couple different apps that gave us the ability to do that. Some were good, some were bad. So when you're looking for these tools, again, make sure that it makes your life easier, not harder, and make sure that if you start having problems with it, see if there's something else you should or is there something you maybe this is not working at all. Maybe it's something you need to do yourself. Wow. There's a couple of good little follow-up pieces of wisdom there. And the first one is, yes, once you find it, stick with it. This is part of what we actually, this is part of what we talk to with our customers on a regular basis is let's see what you have and how you use it because sometimes you're using it just fine and you may think there's something better and maybe there is, but the cost of transitioning is more than it's worth. And particularly if you know what you're doing, if you're comfortable with the tool, there's going to be that level of discomfort as you move to a new tool. I do want to just because, and this is off topic a little bit, but because you mentioned this, as a developer, I'm going to use an example from years ago. If you know, I get probably a lot of you people have run into the Atlassian series of tools like JIRA, Confluence and stuff like that. Well, I don't know if I don't think it's actually still there. It may still be for some of their products, but it used to be that for $10 for up to like up to 10 users, you could download JIRA, Confluence and a couple of other tools for life. It was a lifelong subscription, 10 bucks, never have to pay money again. Host it yourself, do whatever you want. Now you do have to, I think, pay for some upgrades eventually and some stuff like that. But if you wanted to stick to one version forever, awesome. I'm like, cool, I'm going to do that. I'm going to throw it on a server. The problem is, is that means I'm administering it and about once a quarter, I would like need to go get a, you know, go get an update and go install it and stuff like that. And I would probably spend, I don't know, two or three hours like migrating, doing all this kind of stuff for $10 a month. You could get a hosted version, same number of users, their server, their problem. It just works. Didn't work necessarily quite as fast as what I could set up on mine, but it still worked. It took me very little time to calculate what it was going to call, what it cost me to maintain my server for free software, free after I'd spent the 10 bucks. So now that's like, that's in the past. So, you know, year two, year three, year four, zero money on the software. But the administrative side was well over the 120 bucks it costs to do 10 months, 12 months at $10 or 10 months at $12 if you wanted to go that way. So the moral of that story is, think about the value of your time. Now there are other things or other factors in there, maybe that you want to learn how to administer, that you want to spend some time in that, you want to learn that tool or something like that. Okay. But if it's just raw, hey, I can do that. So I'm going to, that's where you should be like, yeah, you can do it. But should you? Now with the tools, I want to, I really do want to like sort of wrapping this up is go back to the point there. I just brought up about Michael saying like stick with it. Once you find one, stick with it. Because for us, yes, you may eventually need to stick with something new because it may, you know, just not be very good. It may fall behind and maybe there's another good product out or something like that. But you don't want to do this very regularly. You want to find something and stick with it. And if you're like me and like Michael, I happen to know I'm going to like call him out on this because we both do this. When you see six different applications, you're going to see features of each of those that you want. And you're going to be tempted to use two or three of them at a time. And this is not a developer problem. I have been in a lot of customers that have no development experience whatsoever. And they want to use, and they do use three or four different things that basically do the thing, the application, basically the same thing. We have to watch out for that because it's really easy for us to do stuff like, you know, bounce around and do, you know, have 18 windows open at a time. And we think that we're doing more. This goes back to another favorite is are you being productive or are you being busy? So just because you have 14,000 windows up does not mean you're being productive. Find your tool, find a way to make it yours, use it. That's if you're doing it for yourself. Now, on a general sense, you can just like, when you're just learning about it, cut it off, like have a have a limit, time box it, spike it, whatever you, however you want to look at it as basically say, okay, I'm going to spend two days on this or three days on this or a week on this. And then I'm going to move on to the other one and stick with that because now sometimes, you know, if it sucks and you want to pale on and day one, awesome. But if it's doing pretty good, there's going to be a limit unless you're on the last one and you're like, I love it. This is it fine. But anything else, you got to limit yourself. Otherwise it's really easy to get lost in rabbit holes. And you're going down all these little rabbit trails and you're, you're spending way too much time playing around with the like the neat little features of the app, as opposed to like getting that holistic kind of knowledge that we want to. Now before the challenge, I'm going to throw it back to you one more time, Mike, because I think you had a couple, it looks like you had a couple things to say. Yeah, you touched on, you know, look at your time and the cost of time on like time it takes to do something. Even if you find an app that is wonderful, it does everything you want. If you were spending more time doing that task than you were before the app, that app's not worth it. You got to be careful about the tools that you use, that they are not just beneficial, but they're also, they fit within that time box for your time versus money. So you want to make sure that the effort involved makes sense. So be careful because I've run into this trap quite a bit where as Rob threw out, I liked using multiple apps. I'm always checking out the app stores, seeing what's out there because it's always changing. But the trick is the whole 80 20 rules is kind of flip for applications. The apps that are out there is probably more 20% are more valuable to you for your time versus the rest. So spend a little bit of time, a little bit of effort and make sure you're not wasting time. Yeah, that's, that's where I say it is where we get in that challenge of being better developers, being more productive with our time as opposed to just being busy and cranking stuff out that may not be the most productive route. Now for the challenge for this one is to spend the next seven days and start with the first day pick this one. We're not going to do like the full evaluation. The apps to start with this is just this week, get a list and then each day spend five or 10 minutes going out to the site of one of them and just get to know a little bit about it. Is it something that has a demo? What's up with the demo? What's the value of it? Things like that because then I think at the end of the week, it'd be really cool for you to even at the end of the week. Now you've spent a little bit of time. So, you know, these tools a little bit, get to the end and maybe craft yourself a little plan. How am I going to go deeper for these plans for these projects or these applications or whatever they are? Or another thing to do is just say, okay, now I'm going to go to a different type of tool and just do that for, you know, if you get a week, then there's one line of business, one type of application that you're going to know more about, preferably one that's in your at least job adjacent or something like that. If not something specifically for your employers, if you want some very easy ones to do anything that's a Wiki related kind of site, anything that is a bug or task related kind of site, anything that's a time tracking kind of site, and then probably anything that is a like a Visio type tool or things like that. Those are just like everybody and a mail client, mail clients, everybody use them. Those mail clients is a fun one because you're going to find a bunch that you've never heard of and you might find one that you actually like. There's some pretty cool things out there specifically now as we're getting into the world of AI, there's some neat stuff. So that's your challenge. When you get done with it, I would love to hear what's your top three products and whatever your area is that you decide to check out. Send us an email at info at developernord.com, leave us a comment, whether you're watching us on YouTube, whether you're listening to the podcast, you can send us, we have a contact us form on developernord.com, you can check it out there. You can check out the quote new developernord.com that was really just a couple of minor changes, but it's what do you expect with 10 to 15 minutes? Come on. And I think I spent more than that because I got bit by Google AdSense and some of its kind of stuff and setting it up in our site, which had to catch up a couple of things to get to that point. That being said, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time.