DevHunt Digest #1: Who’s Going to Win This Week?

DevHunt is the open-source platform where you can showcase your developer tool. Teams compete every week for the top spot. Here's a look at who's in the race this week.

15 tools launched this week on DevHunt. There's a wide variety of solutions ranging from analytics to API developer tools.

Note: this is the first issue of DevHunt Digest, a weekly review of the latest launches on DevHunt. This post is written a bit into the weekly voting but I plan to write these posts as soon as I can after the new round begins. Any feedback is welcome!

Firecamp

Firecamp is an open-source Postman alternative. I'm personally not too familiar with Postman, I know what it is and what it's for but I haven't used it before trying Firecamp.

I generally like the landing page of the project. It clearly states what it is for, and why it's worth using. However, I'm a little bit uncertain about their promise to build APIs 3x faster. Firecamp is 3x faster compared to what? Postman? Building APIs in VSCode? I'm not sure.

I signed up, moved on to try one of the API endpoints of my team's project, dyrector.io. I got a lovely 403 response, which I didn't really understand first, even reached out to the team but I got no response. By the time I made sure it's a CORS error, I already checked other API endpoints and Firecamp seems to do its thing.

WishKit

WishKit is a customizable tool you can use to gather user feedback about your application. You can integrate it into your Mac OS and iOS apps.

What I really like about this tool is its simple and straightforward dashboard. When you create a new feature request, you can filter on its popularity based on how much revenue comes in from your paid users.

They actually have a pretty cool tutorial video which can bring anyone closer to what they're trying to achieve but the link to it is a bit subtle on the project's landing page.

Grafbase

Grafbase is a GraphQL API deployment tool with a wide range of capabilities and integrations. They recently turned open source, so welcome on board, Team Grafbase!

Checking out Grafbase, the first thing that caught my eye was the term serverless. Their website implies that CLI is rather designed for testing purposes but documentation gives very detailed guidance about how to use the it for self-managed use. And it runs without Docker if that's something you consider a trade-off.

I didn't really dig deep into the tool itself as I'm not really familiar with databases, especially GraphQL, but one thing I can tell for sure: Grafbase's documentation is simply amazing! Good job.

ScreenshotOne

ScreenshotOne allows you to create screenshots with API calls. Essentially you can configure a bunch of settings to make the ideal screenshot. Based on their documentation, you can take screenshots in bulks, inject them to S3 buckets and so on.

They highlight the use cases of creating OG images - useful for SEOs -, generating marketing visuals.

Colour Picker

Colour Picker lives up to its promise: it's nothing but a color picker for Windows. You can pick colors from any window, save them and copy their hexcode.

Tokens

Tokens is an API you can use to calculate how many tokens are needed for ChatGPT. It would be nice to have some kind of tutorial or documentation about how to use it.

Picyard

Picyard is not a simple screenshot editor you can use in your browser. You can generate and edit images with a bunch of gradients, different styles and based on lots of templates, too.

Code Snippets AI

Code Snippets AI is a GitHub Copilot-like solution that utilizes GPT-4, GPT-3.5 and PaLM2. It can be used in VSCode and as a Chrome extension, as well. According to their landing page, they don't share or use the code used with the solution, so I was brave enough to use my Python application that counts from 1 to 100 and writes cat next to each number.

First two things I checked out were the languages supported and documentation. While I prefer straight-to-the-point documentation, the information seems very thin to me compared to how many things you can seemingly do with the platform. The landing page claims they support Python, JavaScript, Java, C, C++, C#, Ruby, Go, Rust, Swift, Kotlin, PHP and SQL.

Easy sign up flow leads to a clean and straightforward UI. With the free plan you can only store and share snippets with your teammates. The Developer plan starting at $4 is promised to come with a month of free trial. When I tried to get the free trial, I didn't see any information about it on the payment page, so I decided not to go further with the testing of Code Snippets AI, which I think can be a promising developer tool.

Aptabase

Aptabase is an open-source alternative to Google Firebase Analytics inspired by Plausible. I quickly signed up, and I was immediately on a screen where I could add my application and select the framework of my app to get on-boarded to Aptabase with its SDK.

First thing I missed when I looked at their landing page was a lack of documentation section. Plot twist: documentation comes when you select the framework for the Aptabase SDK. It's good to know that some kind of documentation exists, it would be even better to be aware of its existence and content before signing up.

Unfortunately I have no software I could use to test Aptabase with, but feel free to give them a test run and let the community know how you liked it in the comments.

Telesite

Telesite is a website builder that utilizes some type of generative AI. Telesite's website mentions Telegram bots, too, so I'm kind of confused about the purpose of this project.

Anyway, I logged into Telesite, found the editor and tried to generate a header block for my new website by typing Software development into the Topic field. I probably made a mistake because I got a soap as a result and it didn't change on my later attempts either.

I tried to find some kind of tutorial but the only video I found was in a language I don't speak or understand, so I couldn't get things done with Telesite, unfortunately.

ThriveOnDev

ThriveOnDev is a continuous learning platform for developers. It seems like a tool where you can track and visualize your progress when you learn about new stuff. There are lots of different courses but I'm not quite sure about how you can use them other than organizing the steps of the courses and leaving private and public notes about the courses. My expectation was to see actual course material.

What I really like about the concept is the idea to visualize your progress with GitHub-like green squares.

LocaleData

LocaleData is a translation management platform for Ruby on Rails applications. The very first thing that caught my eye on the website was documentation. On the bright side the sections of documentation contain all the information you need, what I prefer when I see documentation without further context is to see a Get started or an Intro section where I can better understand how I can use the application.

Anyway, you can use LocaleData by uploading what you'd like to translate in YAML, make the changes individually or with your teammates, export the translation in YAML and boom, you're good to go.

EasyBar

EasyBar is a barcode generator. I tried the desktop version for Windows, not sure if there's a browser edition. Regardless, I have good news: it does generate barcodes! Some settings, such as barcode data and barcode type seem to be a premium feature because I couldn't type anything into those fields.

Pandora

Pandora is an open-source developer toolbox. It provides a variety of development middleware for MySQL, Redis, Zookeeper, Kafka, and available for offline use, too.

GraphQL AI

GraphQL AI is an AI platform that brings different models to one place. After sign up I was quickly able to check out the platform and it lives up to its promise: you can easily switch between models and reuse the prompts without composing them again.

That's it for the weekly batch of developer tools that launched on DevHunt. What's your favorite project out of them? Leave it in the comments and show some love by casting a vote!

My team also launched on DevHunt and took the #1 spot. Support us with a star on GitHub!