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Humans and their ability to innovate and execute on the internet have not seen any stagnation since the time when we paid for 1 GigaByte of data for a month. As we come across infinite tools to help us write, listen, sleep, eat, and perform better in our lives, the people developing these tools are ever-increasing as well.
Then there are people driven to help make these tools more quickly, easily, and readily available for us. They build Developer Tools to ease developers' inevitable hassles of building services. This article features ten DevTools with varied scopes that contributed to this community and were part of the YC program.
Gitlab
DevOps
While building software, especially in larger organizations, one of the toughest tasks is maintaining uniformity in communication among all involved along with managing all tasks involved. GitLab is a DevOps platform that helps teams move from planning to executing and delivering all in one software. It supports both small businesses and enterprises and provides resources to get started with DevOps.
Replit
In-browser IDE
It's said that one does not need computers or devices with high specifications to get started with programming. Setting up code editors might be cumbersome for some people and that is the problem Replit is solving. It allows you to write and run code in 50+ languages without any setup. It started as an in-browser code editor and now assists with hosting, collaborative programming, and its own community to increase one's network and global reach.
Theneo
Documentation
If there is one thing developers don't prefer doing, it is documenting. The process of creating and maintaining docs with different versions being updated frequently can be tedious. Theneo helps in generating Stripe-like API documentation with a few clicks. This documentation is interactive, gives you the ability to import your API collection, tracks user behaviour, and supports Python, Java, Ruby, Go, Node.js, and more.
Raven
API for all notifications
Notifications have become an integral part of retaining users if used correctly. Managing these notifications especially when one has multiple mediums has known to occupy time and other resources.
Raven was built to solve this same problem that the founders faced -- 100+ hours of managing notifications. It is a single platform where you can manage your SMS, Email, WhatsApp, In-app, Chat, and more such notifications with fallbacks in case of failures and insights into how they are performing.
Abbot
ChatOps
Customer-facing teams usually deal with numerable queries in a day and juggle between addressing the time-sensitive issues to other special mentions, not forgetting the various spam requests they get. The process is tiring and needs to be done every day. Abbot is driven with the intention of customer success by allowing you to manage your user queries in slack, sorting them according to priority, automating certain responses, and tracking activity to gain insights for product development.
Requestly
Debugging tool for frontend developers
Testing an application for various scenarios is time-consuming and might lead one to spend time finding the right tool to cover even a single edge case that could break the app. Requestly is a platform made for debugging and testing your web and mobile application with features such as redirect URLs, modify Headers, insert custom scripts, mock server, Android debugger, and more.
Aptible
DevSec
Security of a service's infrastructure is a key component when running software as users trust you with their information. Aptible, inspired by Heroku, developed a Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) where they take care of cloud security and the developer can focus on the product. Highly used in the healthcare industry, they provide fully-managed cloud infrastructure, pass security audits, and more.
Zeplin
Design
Design, like many other things, is an iterative process involving not just a designer but the stakeholders, engineers, product managers, and such. It can be a headache to collaborate on a design file while ensuring all requirements are met along with the aesthetics. Zeplin is a workspace for design that is made with the intention of reducing these headaches by giving designers the ability to define user journeys, cite API endpoints, discuss with other team members, integrate with tools that your organization uses, and a Figma plugin.
Rainforest
No-code QA Platform
Software testing is complex and requires comprehensive knowledge of the software to be performed well. While Quality Assurance teams are meant for this, the product developers and managers could add an edge to the testing as well. Rainforest is a no-code testing platform that supports automated, crowdsourced, browser, and mobile testing. It runs tests in parallel using virtual machines to get faster results with detailed reports as well.
Docker
App store for server configurations
Common problem developers face is making sure their application runs the same in different environments i.e., different OS, OS versions, hardware, etc, these are compatibility issues that affect the efficiency of the team. Docker solves this using Containers which ensure that each application can manage its own versions and dependencies within itself and not affect the underlying environment and not be dependent on a particular setup either.
There are plenty more YC DevTool companies that work every day to provide an improved development experience for developers, managers, and more in all types of industries and this is just the tip of the iceberg. This shows that there will always be a need for such tools as we advance more in our lives and technology.
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