10 Basic Mac Tools To Empower You In A Software Space —Mandatory Skill To Crack Software Interviews❌ 🏆
Why Do We Need Tools? Why Should I Learn It?
The tools that are required in all aspects to automate tasks and processes, solve specific problems or meet specific needs, support and facilitate communication and collaboration, improve productivity, and analyze and process data.
Each tool is designed in a way to cater to a specific needs of a specific target audience. Working with the tools that effectively solve time sensitive problems that do require skill and using those tools to your advantage is a separate skill altogether.
As a Technical/Software Engineer, having the right set of tools can make a big difference in your productivity and effectiveness. Knowing these tools had become an important skill in this competitive atmosphere. In Software Interviews, specifying these tools and their utilization will always put you up front on the queue and will provide a greater edge over other candidates.
While there are many commercial tools available for Mac, there are also a number of excellent open-source tools that you can use to improve your workflow and get your work done more efficiently.
Here are the 10 of the best open-source Mac tools + a Bonus tool that I come across in my daily life:
Visual Studio Code: Visual Studio Code is a popular code editor that is available for Mac and other platforms. It offers a wide range of features, including syntax highlighting, code completion, and debugging tools, making it a great tool for writing and debugging code. It got millions of open-source extensions to support your coding environment and to make your life easier. For example, if you are creating a website for your profile or in general, you can run the LiveServer extension to host your website locally in seconds and it got hot reload feature built-in.
Git: Git is a version control system that is widely used by Software Engineers, Cloud Experts, Administrators, and even DevOps to manage their code repositories. It allows you to track changes to your code over time and collaborate with other developers more effectively. By using version control, you can rollback to any specific version for compatibility testing or in case of Production Pipelinefailures. In addition to this, GitHub is used by organizations to track issues, bugs, fixes, and enhancement requests for the development team.
Docker: Docker is a tool that allows you to run applications in lightweight containers, making it easier to deploy and run applications in different environments and within seconds. It is particularly useful for testing and deploying applications in a closed environment that makes things easier for everybody who are using it. You can make use of the container image library i.e. the docker hub to pull images and deploy applications.
Postman: Postman is a very important and powerful tool when you are working on APIs. It is a tool for testing endpoints and creating collections of APIs to automate them. It allows you to send HTTP requests and view the responses, making it a useful tool for debugging and testing APIs. You can monitor the endpoints and their status too.
Ansible: Ansible is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate the deployment and configuration of applications and infrastructure. It is particularly useful for managing large, complex environments. It is very useful for Network engineers and Administrators to deploy agents and fleets across big clusters i.e. even 1000-node clusters. It is a very proficient tool if you wanted a career as a Cloud Engineer or Devops.
Terraform: Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and managing infrastructure as code. It allows you to define your infrastructure using a declarative language similar to the Ansible, making it easier to manage and deploy infrastructure at scale. For example, you can use Terraform ` i.e. *.tf files to deploy your websites on multiple web servers using apache2 in a jiffy.
Sublime Text: Sublime Text is a fast, lightweight code editor that is popular among Software Engineers and DevOps. It offers a wide range of features, including syntax highlighting, code completion, and custom plugins, making it a powerful tool for writing and debugging code. There are specific shorts or hotkeys that would make you a legend among your colleagues. This tool is very essential for handling editing work smarter.
Wireshark: Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer that allows you to capture and analyze packets on a network. It is a powerful tool for troubleshooting and debugging network issues. For example, if your customer is stating that his/her Button 🔴 is not working in your SaaS application so you can ask for a HAR file that consists of all the network details for you to debug and help them efficiently. These HAR files can be traced and imported into Wireshark for analysis.
Vagrant: Vagrant is an open-source tool that is used to automate the creation and configuration of virtual development environments. It allows you to create and manage virtual machines (VMs) that are configured with specific software and settings, making it easier to set up and maintain development environments for different projects. As Virtual Box by Oracle is not largely supported on the Mac M1/M2 chip arch so Vagrant works as a great alternative.
iTerm2: iTerm2 is a terminal emulator that is a popular alternative to the built-in Terminal app on Mac. It has a number of advanced features, such as split panes, search, and customizable hotkeys, that make it a powerful tool for working with the command line. For example, if you’re using multiple containers for testing, you SSH each container using the split panes option and could monitor simultaneously.
[Bonus Tool]
Flycut: Flycut is a small utility that runs in the background and tracks the items that are copied to the clipboard. It allows you to easily access and paste these items at a later time, making it a useful tool for improving productivity. There are numerous times I had to use cmd+tab for copying code snippets, variable values, and images. But, post using Flycut, it broke all the clutter and usage of cmd+tab altogether. It is a very powerful tool for daily activities. Here is the Github Repo that you could make use of.
Overall, these are just a few of the many open-source tools that are available for Mac and can be useful for most engineers and there are different variants that cater to similar use cases. By leveraging these tools, you can be a better engineer and get your work done more efficiently.
NOTE: There are other tools like JIRA, Confluence, Notion, Slack, and many more that you would need to be aware of to become a fail-proof employee in many software organizations. But, the tools and their utilization is completely based on each role and their responsibilities.
That said if you got to know any tools through this article and got excited to try them out. Please feel free to share your comments on whether you liked it.
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