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Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

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Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#151

Post by steventhedev »

bjconlan wrote: post #52

I think something that relates to the pain of onboarding with unique configurations for core tools used by developers would be useful. To be specific I wish I didn't have to forward a developer to an already obsolete wiki page then nod and smile as they complain/tussle with the experience/vernacular/context of a document that has no owner. I think this is a bigger problem (which could be mine and mine alone as everyo…

At an old job I spent my first week on the job documenting the process from a wiki page into a bash script (albeit with some comment sections that said "do this manually"). A year later, one of our devs was up for a laptop upgrade and I convinced him to give Linux a try. I shared my script with him and he was up and committing code later that afternoon. The next week we had a company wide mandate to switch to linux for dev laptops.

Point is that just taking the tiny step of forcing this from a wiki page into code can tip things towards automation. The real difficulty is keeping those scripts up to date. I'm still working on a solution for that (hopefully I'll have something to share in the next few weeks).

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#152

Post by bsnnkv »

MivLives wrote: post #83

I want a tool that lets me annotate a codebase but with the notes stored locally and not in the code. This would mostly be for corporate code bases so I can take notes/ leave more explicit warnings for others. Less "Turns markdown into react components" and more "If you have to touch this, you need to go to file x, add it there" I understand this is imperfect but so is the codebase I work on.

I have written an internal tool where I work that does this for our DevOps/Platform/Infrastructure repos. Basically, you annotate the code, and the annotation points you to somewhere easy to update (Confluence etc.) where you can add notes about the code.

Multiple files, repos etc can have the same reference, so when a CI pipeline runs for a PR on any repo, you get a nice PR comment showing you a tickbox-list of all the other places in the org where this reference exists for you to look at and to make sure you're not breaking something elsewhere, along with a link to wherever observations about this reference are written in prose.

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#153

Post by gxt »

A test tool that can take an abstract/general purpose AST and output unit tests for every code path. Complementary features would include pinning tests to 1. Diff 2. Detect regressions. Also having the ability to fuzz the code automatically would be great.

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#154

Post by nikita2206 »

mfrischknecht wrote: post #110
nikita2206 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While others are replying with ‘this or that already does this’, I totally feel you. All the log viewers I’ve worked with (latest ones being DataSet and Kibana) have some holes in their UX. When that compounds with badly configured log pipeline it’s really painful.

I think I have a prototype you might be interested in, but I´d like to manage expectations first :) - It isn´t finished - The code is a mess (and not available online) - The UX clearly needs work - etc. etc. :) ...but I started a thing with basically exactly the same gripes as you two. The only difference: Actually, I don't think collapsing JSON is nearly enough. I want pretty printers (like in GDB) I can rewrite on…

> I want pretty printers (like in GDB) I can rewrite on the fly.

This hits very close! Will have a look at this for sure, thanks.

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#155

Post by mamcx »

I wish to resurrect the spirit of the Fox/dbase family of languages. I start from the bottom with a language more on line with data manipulation: https://tablam.org.

But what they have is integrated REPL + Jupiter-like Command Window + UI Builder. It was a "low-code" kind of tool way before the idea of today, but also a real, full-featured, serous pro-developer environment.

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#156

Post by gxt »

alanbernstein wrote: post #46

At times, I have wanted a text editor that uses a "scroll and zoom" interface for navigating a single, long file. The minimap idea is similar, but I want it fully integrated into the main view. I'm not sure how useful this would be, but I'd like to try it.

I love that idea, some kind of Google maps for code where (0,0) is your main would take out a lot of pain when onboarding into large and poorly documented codebases.

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#157

Post by gmt2027 »

I've wanted a way to track the full context in which code was written or updated for years now.

This would track and save all resources that were accessed as events. I mean online and offline documentation, specs, pdfs, architecture diagrams, code examples and other parts of the codebase, Jira tickets, bug reports, application screens and output, tests run, failing tests, compiler errors and emails. Everything that the human took in as input before outputting that code. What was Bob looking at when he wrote this line of code? If you had been sitting next to him that week, what would you have seen?

When looking at code, a recommendation engine would show that context, using event data and view frequency to compute relevance.

To do this properly would likely need an isolated developer environment separate from any personal use. Another option would be some kind of ML that would filter out irrelevant events or give the developer a chance to manually edit this data at commit time.

A simplified version of this would track the web resources accessed and allow the developer to manually insert additional links, notes and documents.

This is a tool I would pay for. Call it Retrace.

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#158

Post by mredigonda »

This video [0] is from February 2012, but as far as I know this tool is not yet implemented (or at least it is not widely used).

Basically as you are writing a function, you can write sample input for it, and it tells you the intermediate value of each variable inside this function, which lets you reason about the code, makes it trivial to know you've done something wrong, and would make developing a much more interactive experience overall.

In my experience, this is done by hand when writing a function, but a tool like this would make it automatic.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#159

Post by hellohowareu »

MivLives wrote: post #83

I want a tool that lets me annotate a codebase but with the notes stored locally and not in the code. This would mostly be for corporate code bases so I can take notes/ leave more explicit warnings for others. Less "Turns markdown into react components" and more "If you have to touch this, you need to go to file x, add it there" I understand this is imperfect but so is the codebase I work on.

VS Code -> Line Note extension

https://github.com/tkrkt/linenote

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#160

Post by junon »

danielvaughn wrote: post #70
junon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like fuzzing. Do you want fuzzing?

I believe a key component of fuzz testing is randomized input. I’m talking about recording live usage of an application and capturing the observed I/O. Like Playwright, mentioned above, but applied to unit testing rather than E2E.

It's not a key component, in fact a lot of fuzzers do intelligent input culling and whatnot based on static analysis.
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