Unveiling Our Team’s Must-Have Productivity Tools

Developers know best: a reliable tool is priceless. We tapped into this wisdom by chatting with five members of our tech team about their go-to productivity tools. What we found was a mix of essentials, from AI helpers to virtualization platforms, that power their everyday workflow. Let’s dive in and discover the must-haves that keep our team working at their best.

If you could only choose one tool or software application that you find absolutely essential for your work productivity, what would it be, and why?

Daniel R.: With the ongoing rise of AI, I admit my first instinct was to say something like ChatGPT or another form of AI assistant like Github’s copilot. However, on second thoughts another tool that has proven time and time again to be a great resource for information is Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow has helped me on many occasions with its extensive discussions, solutions and problems expressed by our peers in the industry from beginners to veterans.

Tiago B.: Virtualization tools, such as good old virtual machines, containers, subsystems, and hypervisors, but also emulators and paravirtualization, have been critical tools to help me on prototyping, validating, scaling and deploying different projects, even at home. Aspiring tinkerers and makers would do well to get acquainted with free and free tools such as VirtualBox, Docker, Wine, Windows Subsystem for Linux, or Proxmox. One also ends up learning a lot from all the components that make up computers and how different machines interact with it, be it memory and performance aspects to networking, distributed processing across a fleet of containers. Or they may just use them to spool up quick and sandboxed appliances for a particular purpose or one-time need, built by the open-source community, without giving it much thought or having the work of setting them all up from scratch.

Diogo M.: Web browsers are indispensable tools for software developers, significantly contributing to work productivity. Firstly, they provide instant access to a vast array of internet resources and serve as a comprehensive “Coding Library”. With this, I can quickly search for problem-solving, explore new technologies, like for example, the usage of AI. Furthermore, web browsers facilitate collaboration and communication among team members, as they provide a common platform for sharing and reviewing work progress, without the need for another program just hanging around our desktop. A good example of this is our usual daily and weekly meetings. Web browsers are so powerful that they could potentially be your only tool for software development, since they allow you, for example, to use an IDE online, which for now is avoided due to security concerns.

Gonçalo J.: As someone who greatly values having a defined game plan before starting any task – big or small – a lot of my workflow passes through MS Paint and Notepad++. I use them to create basic outlines of what I’m going to do and how I’m going to do it. I think I’d choose Notepad++ because it’s more versatile. Whether I’m trying to figure out how different classes will interact with each other, making a fully-fledged diagram with multiple components and side notes, or writing pseudo-code with highlighting, Notepad++ offers me a blank text canvas with which I can do whatever I need to plan ahead. It’s become one of my go-to tools to express and organize thoughts, and a vital piece of my personal system when facing any assignment.

Daniel P.: I would choose Slack, firstly (and perhaps more obviously) because it allows me to easily reach out to anyone on the team for a quick chat or huddle, but even more importantly, because of all the extra features that it provides like group channels, which are perfect for when you have a problem but are unsure who is best suited to help, or when you need to say something to the whole team, reminders, which are very easy to setup and are also, in my opinion, more easily seen, and self-messaging, which allows me to take notes or save links and images, that I can later access on any device.

Big thanks to our Exaud team for sharing their must-have tools.