You will work harder than you ever thought possible, but the tools will feel light in your hands.
— Tim Cook

Essential Tools That Make You a 10x Developer

What kind of developer are you if you don’t know your tools?
Learning how to use your tools effectively should be one of the first things you focus on.

The Command Line (CLI)

Master the command line. Having commands at your fingertips allows you to work incredibly fast.

I highly recommend the book “The Linux Command Line.”
Once you learn the CLI, you start seeing the operating system in a completely different way. Concepts like pipes, I/O redirection, and tools such as grep allow you to accomplish tasks in seconds that would normally take minutes using graphical tools.

TextEditor

Your editor is your primary interface with code.

Vim is one of the most widely available text editors. If a system is running Linux, there is a 99% chance Vim (or Vi) is already installed. If you know how to use it, you can jump onto almost any machine and start working immediately.

Learning Vim has a steep learning curve, but once you master it, navigating and editing files becomes incredibly fast. You’ll feel like you’re teleporting through your code.

You can also enhance it with plugins like Telescope, which helps you quickly find files and navigate projects.

SourceControl

You need version control to manage your projects, collaborate with others, and keep track of changes over time.

The good news is that you only use about 20% of Git commands 80% of the time, so mastering the basics takes you a long way.

TeminalMultiplexer

tmux allows you to manage multiple terminal sessions inside a single window.

It’s extremely useful when working on remote servers or long-running tasks because your sessions remain active even if your connection drops.

Debugging and Profiling Tools

When your code behaves in unexpected ways, debugging tools help you understand what is happening internally.

You can inspect variables, step through execution, and identify the root cause of bugs or undefined behavior.

curl

curl is a very handy tool for interacting with web APIs, testing endpoints, or scraping data from the web directly from the command line.

Containers

Docker is a modern tool for packaging and shipping software so that it runs consistently on any machine.

It solves the classic problem:

“It works on my machine.”

With Docker, you can create reproducible environments that run the same everywhere.

Not a flex but this is my personalised development environment :)

Here is the my dot-files

Additional awesome resources

Blogs that are worth reading

Web

Systems