Hello everyone.

Welcome to East Coast Customs where we are gonna show you all manner of cool gadgets you can use to take the level of your coding ride up a few notches...

We gotta tell you first that these are in no particular order of importance, you just pick what you haven't tried yet and then give them a go. Pretty sure you'll find some of 'em useful.

With that being said, let's get started.

Marquee

This extension is like your personalized dashboard right within VSCode. Some people like to have their 'New tab' in their browser customized with different things like a background landscape, their to-do list, the news, an inspiring quote, and so on.

You can also bring those same features and more to the 'Home page' of your favorite editor and customize it to have more things to see or to make it less distracting and only focus on the important things for you (like the to-dos for instance.)

I use it in my own laptop (which is quite old already and doesn't load things pretty well) and it's just a matter of experimenting and see what features are more useful than others for your workflow.

Markdown All in One

Like the name of the extension suggests, this has everything you'll probably need when creating and editing Markdown documents. You know getting help with every common feature used to spruce up the formatting on your documents.

If you have started to use Markdown to replace all the typical 'txt' notes (like me) you'll find this very useful. It will also help you with the sometimes arcane syntax of Markdown features.

I wish I'd have found this extension earlier to write all my Markdown-based articles instead of going back and forth between the DEV editor and the Markdown basics of the 'Edit Post' page. 😅

TabNine

This extension is akin to that phrase of "don't work harder, work smarter" because that's precisely what you'll be doing using this extension for work or personal projects.

TabNine is in short, an auto-completer on steroids. It uses a deep learning engine to infer several things about your code and provide you with ever-increasing accurate suggestions for the code you're going to write.

And the positive aspect is that the more you use it, the more it will learn about what kind of programs you write and the better predictions it will have. You just start typing and it will do half (or more) of the work by itself.

I used it when I was working with a project in Angular 8 at work and it made me wrote much better code than I would otherwise write myself.

You gotta try it to see what it's capable of but to give you an idea...

GistPad

This extension is the one that has blown my mind more than any others I've found this year.

It leverages the power of that hidden feature of GitHub for some of us (Gists) that allow you to create code snippets, notes, and interactive samples.

The best part is that it allows you to edit all these Gists and even your actual repositories remotely (!) within the code editor... No need to clone, pull, push, or any of that stuff.

It's as if you could connect to GitHub and start editing stuff locally and when you're done, all the changes are going to be reflected in GitHub regardless of it was a gist or a file or several files in a repo.

I tried it to edit my profile Readme and every time I would make a change and save, then boom! I could refresh the page and my changes were right there live for everyone to see. 🤯

Just to give you an idea of everything you can do with this extension, look at the table of contents.

REST Client

This extension might not completely replace tools like Postman or Insomnia but if you're anything like me, you find those tools over-complicated and with a lot of extra features that you never end up using.

Now, with this extension you can make the necessary API calls and test what's the response you'd be getting plus all the HTTP verbs are available.

If you're more into passing in different options and saving requests, you'll be pleased to know that this extension also supports all those bells & whistles.

Not only you can make REST calls, but you can also interact with data from a GraphQL endpoint and make the adjustments needed to the queries.

There are several features available that you can read about over on the extension's page.

There you have it, folks! A special set of cool and super useful goodies to try out and see for yourself how you can take your Code productivity to the next level.

If you have already used one of these before and have found it useful, let me know how you're using it! And if you have seen them before but haven't tried them yet then it's time that you give one of these a shot.

That's it for this post, thank you for reading and hope to see you in the next one.