🔧 Online tool lists 📄

Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

🎵 The song for this post is Terran Theme 1, by Glenn Stafford for StarCraft. 🎵

I saw this list of tools for game makers in my RSS feed today, and a) wow!, b) it got me thinking of "lists of tools," and how much you're able to achieve with a bit of scrappiness.

One person I've followed for years is Peteris Krumins, who made and runs Browserling. Peteris has a delightful online presence: he often makes comics (some here, main site), and made this one as a bit of a tribute to the "more shell less egg" narrative, which is just my kind of nerdy (the story, some more analysis):

(via)

My favorite thing, of course, is that he still has this graphic on his site:

(it's a reference to The Little Schemer, a book I loved)

Anyway, tools! He's done a cool thing of building/hosting a shit ton of single-use browser-based tools. Here's Online CSV tools, Online Text tools, and online Random tools. There are… many!

Another person I've followed and linked is Evan Miller, who wrote Mac desktop software for statistics use. He's blogged some great things on stats, programming languages, and software generally, but also hosts some great online stats tools, like a Sample Size calculator, which I find useful when talking about whether or not something is worth doing A/B tests for (it's frequently not unless you have lots of activity).

Lastly, if you're exploring a new tech (I encourage you to try Erlang or Elixir), you can usually find an "Awesome-tool" list on GitHub for it. Your mileage may vary, and many of those lists aren't super well-updated, but it can be a good start, especially if you have a specific need ("how do I write XLSX files in Ruby?"). Here's an awesome list of awesome lists. And another one.

I've opened the following tools at least 30 times in the last year:

• UUID Generator, usually when writing test cases for the various applications that use these as IDs.

• Fantasy Name Generator, for my tabletop games.