It is not often that we find tools we actually start to use regularly. We should celebrate finding these rare treasures. Last year, I found 3 such treasures I want to share with you today.
Renovate
Renovate I think was the biggest surprise of 2021 for me. Maybe the simplest pitch for it could be: “Dpendabot on steroids”. It will find dependencies in your code, you haven’t thought about in ages and will suggest updates for them. The tool goes so far, as to detect CDN JS libraries references in HTML files 🙀. It supports almost anything and is just a pleasure to use.
Try Renovate and you will see how many dependencies you have neglected, or even forgotten about.
Hyperfine
A small CLI, that let’s you benchmark shell commands. This might not sound special, but I really liked how easy it was to use. I used it to check the trade offs of the different gzip/Brotli compression levels. Hyperfine allows you to specify a range and it will test accordingly. It will start with a warmup round, run the command to benchmark multiple times and then compile the statistics for you.
While not a tool that I will use everyday, Hyperfine is a tool that I will gladly keep in my belt.
Dive
When working with containers, Dive can be quite useful. You want to get a good overview over where files reside in your image, Or you want to find ways to shrink your container image even further? Dive is your friend.
It is a command line tool that displays the contents of the container image per layer by layer. You can see all files added, removed or changed for each layer. It even calculates wasted space, because of previously added things being deleted or edited in later layers.
I use Dive often to both understand and optimize Docker images. I would recommend you to give it a try.
Summary
These are my 3 finds of 2021. I hope at least one of these can also be useful to you.