Developer Tools

SponsorBlock13.4k★

SponsorBlock automatically skips sponsor segments, intros, outros, and other non-content sections in YouTube videos. It's a browser extension powered by a crowdsourced database: users mark sponsor segments, and everyone else's player skips them automatically. GPL v3. Covers more than just sponsors: intros, outros, "subscribe" reminders, non-music sections of music videos, filler, and previews. The community database has hundreds of millions of submitted segments. Works on YouTube in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, plus third-party integrations in apps like NewPipe and Invidious. Fully free. No paid tier. Community-driven and donation-supported. Install the extension, watch a video, sponsor segments skip automatically. That's it. You can also submit segments yourself when they're missing. The catch: it depends on the community submitting segments. Popular videos get covered quickly. Obscure videos might not have segments marked yet. YouTube could also break the extension with player changes (it's happened before and been fixed quickly). And some creators argue this hurts their sponsorship revenue. Fair point, and you should decide where you stand on that. The tool works. Whether you should use it is a personal call.

whatcable6.1k★

whatcable answers a question macOS hides: what can this USB-C cable actually do? Plug a charger or peripheral into a Mac, and the menu bar tells you the cable's real specs (USB 2.0 vs 5/10/20/40/80 Gbps), its power rating (3A or 5A up to 60W/100W/240W), and why charging might be slower than expected. MIT licensed, free. The data already exists in macOS via IOKit. whatcable surfaces it. No private APIs, no kernel extensions, no daemons. Install via Homebrew (`brew install --cask whatcable`) or grab the signed and notarized .app from GitHub Releases. Apple Silicon only, macOS 14 or later. The "why is my Mac charging slowly" diagnostic is the killer feature. It tells you whether the cable, the charger, or the Mac itself is the bottleneck. This is a niche utility. If you have a drawer of identical-looking USB-C cables and one of them is silently a USB 2.0 charge-only cable, you have already needed this. Free, no paid tier, single-developer maintenance. The catch: Apple Silicon only. Intel Macs use older Thunderbolt controllers that do not expose the PD state and cable e-marker data the app reads.

PureMac4.9k★

PureMac cleans junk off your Mac: caches, logs, Xcode leftovers, Homebrew cruft, mail attachments. Native SwiftUI, zero telemetry, completely free. It's the CleanMyMac alternative that doesn't cost $40/year and doesn't phone home. There's nothing to self-host. Download, install, run. It scans your system and shows exactly what it wants to delete before touching anything. Scheduled auto-cleaning is built in, so you can set it and forget it. macOS 13+ required. This is a personal productivity tool, not an enterprise play. Developers with a cluttered Mac who don't want to pay for CleanMyMac and don't trust closed-source cleaners with full disk access have an obvious choice here. The code is MIT-licensed and publicly auditable. The catch: no malware scanning, no app uninstaller, no smart file deduplication. It cleans known junk paths well but doesn't try to be a full system utility suite.

FxEmbed4.7k★

FxEmbed makes Twitter, X, and Bluesky links render properly when you paste them into Discord or Telegram. Posts that get the silent treatment from social platforms' default embeds (no video, no quote, no poll) suddenly show everything. Type `fxtwitter.com` instead of `twitter.com`, the FxEmbed server resolves the link with full content. MIT licensed. Self-hosting is optional. There's a hosted version that anyone can use for free. To run your own, it's a Cloudflare Workers project: deploy it, point a domain at it. Sub-second response times, no database, no state. Setup is one of the easiest in this list. For people who chat about social posts and want their links to actually render: use the hosted version, no setup required. For privacy-conscious teams or anyone wanting their own instance: self-host on Workers, roughly $0/mo at low volume. It's a workaround for what social platforms refuse to fix on purpose. If those platforms ever build better embed support for outside chat clients (they won't), this becomes redundant. Until then, it's the cleanest fix going.

panel2.8k★

AcePanel is a server control panel for Linux that manages Nginx, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, FTP, and SSL certs through a clean browser UI. One curl command to install, single Go binary, runs on basically nothing in terms of resources. The developers explicitly committed to permanently free with no paid tier ever. Installation takes under five minutes on a clean Ubuntu, Debian, or CentOS box. It handles the Nginx configs, database management, FTP accounts, and Let's Encrypt certs that you'd otherwise be writing config files for by hand. Supports both amd64 and arm64, so Raspberry Pi setups work too. Solo developers running a VPS get the full cPanel experience for $0. Small teams managing a handful of web servers get a unified control plane without per-server licensing. There is no paid tier to upgrade to because there isn't one. The catch: documentation is primarily in Chinese. The community is smaller than competitors like HestiaCP or Webmin, and the maintainer team looks small. If you need English-first docs and a large plugin ecosystem, look at HestiaCP instead.

renode2.6k★

Renode does exactly that. Picture a virtual hardware lab where you run your actual firmware binary against simulated chips. built by Antmicro (embedded systems consultancy). Supports ARM Cortex-M/A, RISC-V, Xtensa, and other architectures. You define your hardware in a configuration file: CPU, memory, UART, SPI, I2C, GPIOs, and Renode simulates it cycle-accurately enough to run real firmware. Fully free to use. The license is listed as 'Other': it's the MIT license for most components. Antmicro provides commercial support, custom platform models, and integration services for enterprise customers, but the tool itself is free. Solo embedded developers: run firmware tests without buying dev boards. Small teams: CI/CD integration: test firmware on simulated hardware in your pipeline. Medium to large: simulate multi-device networks and test inter-device communication without a hardware lab. The catch: simulation is never perfect. Timing-sensitive firmware may behave differently on real hardware. Not every peripheral is modeled; you may need to write custom peripheral models for uncommon chips. And the documentation, while improving, assumes you already know embedded development. If you're not writing firmware, this tool has no use case for you.

velxio2.2k★

Velxio lets you write, compile, and run microcontroller code in your browser without owning a single board. Pick an Arduino, ESP32, or Pico, write your C++ or Python, wire up components on screen, and it actually emulates the chip, not a cartoon of it. Under the hood it runs real CPU emulation through projects like avr8js, rp2040js, and QEMU, with a Monaco editor, more than 48 interactive components, a serial monitor, and Arduino library support. For makers and students, that means prototyping before the parts arrive. You can use the hosted version at velxio.dev for free, which is how most people will start. Self-hosting is supported through Docker, but it is a multi-service app, a TypeScript frontend with a JavaScript and Python backend doing the emulation, so it is more involved than a single container. Call it moderate effort to run your own. The license is AGPLv3, with a separate paid commercial license for anyone who wants to use the code inside a closed-source product. That is the key thing to understand: you are not paying to unlock features, you are paying to escape copyleft. The hosted app is free and full-featured. Solo makers, students, and educators are the obvious fit. It substitutes for the paid tiers of Wokwi, and on the desktop side competes with Proteus and the open-source SimulIDE and Renode. The catch is maturity. This is a young project with a solo maintainer, so the bus factor is one and the long-term roadmap is unproven. The simulation is impressive today, but bet your curriculum or your product on it with that in mind.

clawsweeper1.9k★

ClawSweeper is a GitHub maintenance bot that uses an LLM to identify stale issues and PRs and propose closing them with reasoning attached. It also has a commit sweeper that flags potential issues in code. MIT licensed, free, runs on GitHub Actions or as a GitHub App. Schedule-driven: hourly for hot items, daily for items under 30 days, weekly for older ones. Or trigger it on demand against a SHA range. The pitch vs stale-action and probot/stale is that it actually reads the issue, the PR, and main, then produces evidence ("implemented in commit X" or "duplicates issue Y") instead of closing on timeouts. Pick this if you maintain an OSS repo with hundreds of stale issues and not enough time to review them. Solo maintainers: huge time saver, you only review suggestions. Small teams: same. Large engineering orgs probably build this internally; the public version is geared toward OSS maintenance patterns. The catch: LLM-assisted bots make mistakes confidently. ClawSweeper proposes closures, it does not auto-close, and that's the right default. If you wire it to auto-close, you will lose real bug reports.

pyRevit1.8k★

pyRevit turns Autodesk Revit into something you can automate without a software team. Revit is the heavyweight CAD tool architects and engineers model buildings in, and out of the box, repetitive tasks eat hours. pyRevit lets you write small scripts in Python and drop them into the Revit toolbar as buttons your whole office can click. Free, open source, GPL licensed. Setup is an installer, not a DevOps project, which is the point. You sketch an idea, wire it to a button, and push it to the team through one shared interface. It ships with a pile of built-in tools so you're not starting from zero, and there's a CLI and a telemetry server if you want to manage deployment and usage across a larger firm. The scripting is IronPython or CPython, approachable for someone who isn't a career programmer. This is for the person inside an architecture or engineering shop who got tired of doing the same Revit chore fifty times and wants to fix it. Solo practitioners get the built-in tools for free. Firms get a way to standardize workflows without paying a vendor to build custom add-ins. There's no paid tier, it's free at every size. The catch is the blast radius is exactly one application. If your team doesn't live in Revit, none of this matters. And GPL means anything you distribute on top inherits the license, so check that before you ship custom tools outside your own walls.

dev30001.5k★

Dev3000 is a CLI tool that captures your entire development session: server logs, browser console output, network requests, screenshots, and user interactions in one unified timeline. From Vercel Labs. Free, MIT-licensed. Install via npm or bun globally, run d3k in your project, and it hooks into your Node.js server and browser. AI agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf) can read the live timeline for context. No persistent server required. The cloud collaboration features use Vercel Sandbox if you need to share sessions. If you use AI coding assistants and spend time context-switching between terminal logs and browser DevTools, this is directly useful. The CLI is free with no limits. Solo developers working with agentic tools are the target audience here. The catch: Vercel Labs means experimental. Headless capture mode has rough edges. Deeper cloud features will likely require deeper Vercel platform integration over time.

sandboxes686★

sandboxes gives every user a private, throwaway environment where code runs and shows up at a shareable preview URL. It's built for the AI app-builder pattern: a user describes an app, an agent writes it, and it goes live at a link. One Go binary orchestrates Docker containers with automatic preview URLs and TLS, no Kubernetes involved. MIT licensed. The density trick is stop-on-idle and wake-on-request, so a single box can hold a lot of sandboxes without keeping them all warm. OpenCode and Claude Code agents come preinstalled, and there's an HTTP API to create, run, and destroy environments. You'll need a Linux VPS with Docker. The install is one command, but you own host security, scaling, and TLS from there. This is the open alternative to E2B and Daytona, the paid sandbox-as-infrastructure services that AI coding products run on. It also overlaps the backend of app-builders like Lovable, Bolt, and Replit. Solo and small teams prototyping agent infrastructure: self-host it. Teams shipping this to real users: read the security notes first, then decide. The catch: it's days-old beta, and the isolation is containers, not VMs, so the README itself warns it is not safe for running untrusted strangers' code without gVisor, Kata, or Firecracker. API auth is also off by default. Fine for your own agents, risky for a public service as it ships.