Fun Links 2016-02-26

Today my links fall into the category of “dev tools”. Some may even lean into the “DevOps” territory. They are all language agnostic but mostly focus on web applications.

LaunchDarkly
https://launchdarkly.com/
LaunchDarkly calls itself “feature flags as a service” which seems like as good a description as any. It is a service that you integrate with your web application to allow you to roll out new features slowly, tracking the results. You can use it to do A/B testing, beta releases, or even to provide premium features to some users. Essentially, a formalized means to provide feature toggling through a nice UI. Most big sites build their applications this way; with new, in-development, code deployed for weeks or months before it is ready to be turned on.

StopLight
https://stoplight.io/
StopLight is an API design and testing service. It provides visual tools to build your API and can export the specification in a few different formats including the popular Open API Initiative (Swagger) format. Also, it can also be used to make calls into your existing API as a test client. And it can use Prism to record and playback or mock out an API for testing as a test server. All said a full feature API toolkit.

diff-so-fancy
https://github.com/so-fancy/diff-so-fancy
Who says appearances don’t matter? If you are looking to tidy (and fancy) up your git diffs, then you need diff-so-fancy. It is a visual filter which builds on other tools to provide in-line character diff highlighting and better file separation. You can use diff-so-fancy once-off, or set it as your default for all diffs.