Question
What's the best software only people in your industry would use?
There's the software everyone uses: The things that come with macOS or Windows, suites like Microsoft Office and G Suite, productivity tools like Todoist, Evernote, and Notion, communication tools like Slack and Gmail.
Then there are the tools that only people who do what you do would use. Tools for your industry, tools for your role, tools that help you in your job—and that few other jobs would need to use.
What are your favorite software that are little known outside your industry?
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Definitely ngrok.io. For software developers, there are a lot of niche tools that make our lives easier. But ngrok stands out.
What it does
When programmers build websites or APIs, we typically build and host them on our personal computer while developing. This makes it easy to build and change things quickly. But it's problematic if your project relies on another website having access, since a development server on your personal computer isn't accessible to the internet. Ngrok.io makes a public endpoint that remote services (or users) can access, then redirects traffic back your personal project.
Why this matters
I recently built a Slack app that relied on users running commands in Slack, which then forwarded the user input to my service via the API. Ngrok allowed me to work on the project on my computer, while testing it on a live Slack application. This would be difficult without ngrok.
We've been using sherlockscore.com for only a month or two. It's been a huge help measuring activation and adoption and getting Intercom to fire off the right messages at the right moments.
Interesting, I thought Intercom had a built-in scoring tool. Does it—and if so, is Sherlock's enough of an improvement to be worth using alongside Intercom's?
You're right. Intercom does have activity scoring, but Sherlock is much better at tracking the user events we want to see in-app.
I'm gonna have to mention RubyMine (and JetBrains IDEs in general) again. It's amazing the amount of useful features it has built in. Just to mention one, it's DB management tools are superior to most other standalone tools I've tried. Having a full fledged IDE (which I have open all the time) for writing and running SQL is just unrivaled.
Absolutely worth the money and RAM it eats.
RubyMine was a popular choice in another discussion about software you personally pay for—so that’s quite the endorsement.
I just opened their site, and they may have the best cookie popover yet as a fake terminal. Brilliant.
Looking for a better way to plan remote meetings across time zones, and keep up with events. What software is doing that best today?
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Oh wow, that’s super cool.