If you're a software developer and your current working environment is windows you need to see
DevToys. It is basically a swiss army knife for us, developers and it has potential to save us
a lot of time and headache. But before we dive into it, let's first address the problem that it
solves. While we are coding we generally need tools for lots of operations such as conversions, data
generation, encoding, decoding, formatting and so on. To deal with them, we tend to search up the things
that we needed on google and try to find our way from there. As long as it works it should be okay
right? Well, actually not. The thing is although they might work you'll never know the sites that you are
visiting are malicious or not. And these sites tend to process large amounts of data on daily basis.
And running that kind of load is not something cheap. So, if those sites are free with no paid
plans, that is kinda sus. On top of that, if you are coding from a remote location where the internet
access is limited we basically can't do sh*t. And this brings us to the DevToys. It is made by
Etienne Baudoux and Benjamin Titeux. And sorry if i butchered their names. But anyway, it is essentially
a set of useful tools packed together. And it is both open-sourced and also works offline. So
it solves the problems that we've mentioned earlier. It also has an amazing feature, which
I will be showing you later on in this video. Now let's look at how we can install and use it. First
we head over to its site, which is devtoys.app. And you can also find its link in the description down
below. There we can click this to go over to the microsoft store and install it from there. Or we
can click this to go to the project repository and build it from the source. And once you're done with
your preferred installation method you can open up the app and this is the window that you should get.
So, let's create few usage situations and quickly go over on few of them. First we have json to yaml
converter. So imagine that we are working with AWS and we have this json cloudformation template. And
by the way if you don't know what that is, don't worry it is just a document to create
infrastructure. Like deploying servers, managing access controls, routing and so on. You get the idea.
Now, we want to convert this json template to yaml format because that way it is much more readable
and it is easier to debug. So we copy it, go to the dev toys and paste it into the converter. And there
we go. We have our yaml file. But now we want to check that if there are any differences between
our converted version and AWS's version. So we copy our converted yaml by hitting this button,
and under the text tab we head over to the text difference tool. There we hit paste on the new
text. Then we grab the yaml from the aws page and paste it into the alt text section. And there we
can see the differences. Line breaks, comments and so on. We can also change our view from
split view to inline view by hitting this button. Now let's imagine another situation. This time we
are a front-end developer and we are building a blog page for colorblind people. So obviously
we want to see if our graphics are okay to use or not. To check it we can go over to the color
blindness simulator and upload our image. There I've used the colorblindness test, so as you can see
we can easily see the problematic parts. At this point, we figured out our issue with the graphics.
So we can focus on our blog text. But to test it we need to generate some dummy data. So to
do that, we head over to the lorem ipsum tool, create few paragraphs, and copy them. Just like that.
It is super simple and useful. Now do you remember that in the beginning of this video I have said
that DevToys has an amazing feature? Now, let's look at that. There I have a few data samples.
A base64 string and a json web token. Now check this out, if I copy base64 string and go to the
dev toys, it just auto-detects the right tool and populates it for us. How cool is that! Now let's
try the same with JWT. We copy it and go to the DevToys. And there we go, it is just awesome...
Also you may have noticed the light bulb icon next to the tools. And that means that the copied clipboard
content can be used with the corresponding tool. Which is also a nice indicator. And for some reason
if you want to disable this feature, you can do it from the settings and turning off the smart
detection. Speaking of features we also have the picture in picture mode. We can activate it by
pressing on this button and as you can see now we have a compact version of the selected tool.
That said, this is pretty much the basic summary of the dev DevToys. I personally think that it is a
great project and it has so much potential. Imagine that it includes things like ffmpeg support or
ability to send requests just like the postman does. Literally the possibilities are endless.
And also if you want to start contributing an open source project, I think DevToys can be a great
option. In any case, I hope you like this video and find it helpful. Until next time, take care!