I’d like to share my personal list of tools that helps me to save a couple of minutes every day when working with web applications. Those tools are absolutely free and I take my hat off to say thank you to all software engineers who spend time doing something for free. Just because they love coding. So, let’s begin.
RequestBin
RequestBin gives you a URL that will collect requests made to it and let you inspect them in a human-friendly way. Use RequestBin to see what your HTTP client is sending or to inspect and debug webhook requests.
With this service you don’t need to put breakpoints on a backend to see what is actually coming in the request. May be you even don’t have a backend and you want to see what’s coming out from your TeamCity web hook. This is the tool you need for such a case.
Mockable
Mockable is a simple configurable service to mock out RESTful API or SOAP web-services. Reply with static or dynamic JSON or XML Payload
OMG, my backend engineer will start working on my story only next month! No worries, I can fake all api calls I need with this service. I can simulate almost everything I need for my RESTful or SOAP fake api.
Mailinator
Mailinator is free, public, email system where you can use any inbox you want!
Argh, I need to do a load testing on behalf of a hundred users. Damn, my system wants users to be authenticated with an email address. That is a good task for the service.
Mail Tester
Test the Spammyness of your Emails
Don’t have a clue why users don’t react on invitation emails? May be they don’t know where the junk folder is situated. Try to send an invitation to an email address generated with this service and see what is a chance the message ends up in the junk folder.
Real Favicon Generator
Each platform comes with its own design requirements. You can’t just use the same picture everywhere. RealFaviconGenerator knows this and lets you craft your icons platform per platform.
This one is nice. There are so many rules for different devices to have a high quality favicon for a web site on all of them. I don’t need to know all of them and still have a good result.
JWT.IO
JWT.IO allows you to decode, verify and generate JWT.
This is a service to decode and validate javascript web tokens. The service provided by Auth0. A great service that can handle user authentication for my web application and guess what, you can start absolutely free!
Ably
Ably is a realtime data delivery platform providing developers everything they need to create, deliver and manage complex projects. Ably solves the hardest parts so they don’t have to. Our 100% data delivery guarantee offers unique peace of mind to stream data between apps, websites and servers anywhere on earth in milliseconds.
You’ve probably tried SignalR or socket.io and you may already found how powerful the concept and how hard to maintain a stable infrastructure for web sockets. If not I recommend to not to repeat my mistakes. It looks pretty cool until you find out that web sockets are disabled by default on IIS and Microsoft Azure. Then you may discover that it’s not always possible to setup a web socket connection. How about secure connection, then may be you want to authenticate a user before opening a connection. There are much more little painful pins that was already handled with services like Ably. I personally like this service because of offered features and again I can start absolutely free.
Epoch Converter
Convert epoch to human readable date and vice versa
Simple yet extremely useful tool. Those timestamps, why not to show it as time and date? I don’t understand who can read it?
Ultra Hook
Receive webhooks on localhost
Debugging web hooks behind a firewall is not something you can do easily. With this service it’s possible. Not really that I have to do it everyday although I found it a useful option, so want to share with you as well.
Let’s Encrypt
Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open Certificate Authority.
Stop paying for SSL certificates! Even no need to pay for automated renewal. Event no need to pay for automated renewal on Microsoft Azure! Let’s Encrypt can generate an SSL certificate for your web site in a completely automated way. Highly recommended.
SSL Server Test
This free online service performs a deep analysis of the configuration of any SSL web server on the public Internet. Please note that the information you submit here is used only to provide you the service. We don’t use the domain names or the test results, and we never will.
It’s not always you can use services like Let’s Encrypt that generates an A grade SSL certificate for you with no hassle. Sometimes you still have to use some external API. You may need to know how good is an SSL connection with this API. SSL Server Test can verify if the SSL connection is safe.
Once again. All the people who create great product and give a chance for start-ups and humble developers like myself to use your creations for free, thank you so much for your work.
Happy coding,
Michael Borisov.