Shashi Techlogues
In this post, we will look at some lesser-known tools and websites that can help you easily and quickly with your web development activities.
1. Mongo Playground
Mongo Playground is a simple yet powerful sandbox to test and share MongoDB queries. Sometimes, you quickly want to check a few queries with sample collections.
For example, suppose you want to test whether you can perform an
upsert operation on an array of objects in a MongoDB collection.
Instead of creating collections and setting up a database just to test a query,
you can use Mongo Playground to quickly create a sandbox, try your queries,
and share them with your team members.
There are a few limitations, though. At the time this article was written:
- A database couldn't contain more than 10 collections.
- A collection couldn't contain more than 100 documents.
The query capabilities were also limited. The original article mentions
support for find(), aggregate(), and
update() queries.
If you want to check out the source code, the GitHub repository for the project is available below. If you find the project useful and can extend it, consider contributing to it.
Mongo Playground — GitHub Repository
2. Comma Quote — The Online Comma Separator
Many times we want to query a database with a list of values or IDs, such as user IDs. After getting the list of IDs, we often need to turn them into comma-separated values.
SELECT * FROM users WHERE id IN (1, 2, 3);When the list is very large, manually separating the values with commas can be boring and time-consuming. Thankfully, there are online tools that can help with this and save some time.
This can also help you add quotes around IDs, which is particularly useful when working with MongoDB IDs. You can choose to add either single quotes or double quotes.
3. RegExr
If you are not well versed in regular expressions, coming up with even a simple regex can sometimes be painful. Stack Overflow can often help with common patterns such as email addresses or mobile numbers.
However, when you need a custom regular expression, it can be difficult to come up with one. More often than not, we end up spending a lot of time building and debugging it.
While searching for a regex tool one day, I came across a useful website for both understanding and building regular expressions.
RegExr — Learn, Build, & Test RegEx
Give it a try. It can be a useful tool when working with regular expressions.
4. PlayCode.io — JavaScript Playground
If you want to quickly write and test a JavaScript snippet, PlayCode is useful. Sometimes I get code snippets from Stack Overflow and want to quickly modify and run them to see whether they work as expected.
Instead of putting the code into a project, modifying it, running the application, and checking the result, you can simply use an online JavaScript playground.
I use PlayCode for this purpose. It runs the code on the fly, making it convenient for quick experiments.
PlayCode — JavaScript Playground
5. Comparing Two Lists, Code, or Text
At work, we sometimes encounter situations where we need to compare two lists or two pieces of text to see what has changed.
If the lists are small, you're lucky. But when they become large, manually comparing them can be very tedious.
For example, I once wanted to compare the .env files from two
environments and find out which environment variables were missing or
different. Going through all the variables manually was tedious.
I started looking for tools to help with this and came across ListDiff .
You can provide two lists and see their differences in a clean and straightforward interface.
ListDiff — Compare Multiple Lists
Conclusion
These are a few tools and websites that I use regularly in my work. They help save time and speed up my development workflow.
Hopefully, I will add more tools like these as and when I stumble upon them.
Thanks for reading. If you have some feedback, please provide your response or reach out to me on Twitter or GitHub .
Happy Coding!