Here at Stoplight, we produce open-source tools, which are built with other open-source tools, and we use other open-source tools to design, code, improve, host, and maintain our various products. We’ve talked before about how we support open-source projects which are important to us (with code contributions, financial support, and prominent attribution), so let’s talk about which particular OSS tools we’re big fans of here at Stoplight.
Hasura
Hasura has had mixed reviews at Stoplight, sometimes being a big box of magic we don’t understand, but generally being an absolute hero. We’ve used Hasura to bootstrap an entire platform, very quickly, for free. All of the internal APIs and microservices are running on Hasura, using a mixture of GraphQL and REST, using them both for what they’re best at.
SourceTree
SourceTree is a desktop application (MacOS and Windows) from Atlassian, which is Stoplight engineer, Matt Voget’s favorite UI wrapper around Git.
Some people love using Git via the command line, but that’s not for everyone. After all, we baked lots of Git functionality into Stoplight Studio (our OpenAPI and Markdown editor) so that people wouldn’t need to crack out the command line, and even the most hardcore keyboard warriors enjoy the ease of visual diffs in resolving tricky merge conflicts.
Gifski
Gifski is a popular tool for turning videos into gifs. The support team uses it to convert screen recordings of bugs so they can be uploaded to bug trackers. The engineering team uses it to demo how new functionality looks for others to try out. I’ve used it to show off features in blog posts. It’s super handy.
“Have a video that you want to turn into a gif? Gifski is the real MVP.”
— Noah Betzen, Senior Software Engineer @ Stoplight
(For people not from the USA, that means it’s good!)
Kubernetes: k9s and Lens
Zee Hussain, Stoplight DevOps engineer on the Infrastructure team, uses k9s on a daily basis to manage Stoplight’s Kubernetes clusters.
Less mucking around with arcane commands means more getting on with whatever you were trying to actually do!
This is a common theme, with another one of the teams giving Lens a shoutout:
“You want to see what a kubernetes cluster has to offer? Lens is where it’s at my friend.”
— Noah Betzen, Senior Software Engineer @ Stoplight
We’ve got a great team working on Kubernetes making things as simple as possible, but a handy GUI can usually make things more smooth!
Jest Runner
Michael Miaskowski likes Jest Runner, a small but very handy extension that helps him keep focus when writing tests. Staying in the IDE, instead of debugging in the browser or switching over to the CLI might seem simple, but even a command or two less can speed up the development and allow to focus on specific tasks.
Yjs
Yjs is a TypeScript library that powers the live collaboration editing functionality in Stoplight Studio, which we in turn use for group planning sessions, and note-taking in meetings.
Honorable Mentions
There were a few common mentions.
Anyways, that’s a few of our favorite open-source tools here at Stoplight, but of course, we’re big fans of our own tools as well. Spectral for lining, Prism for mocking, and Elements for documentation make the entire API design process easier and more efficient. You can check out our open-source tools below if you’re interested. Happy Open-Source October!
