Stuff We Love

Updated at: Jul 2, 2024

We use loads of different tools and websites as a part of building the site but here's a few that stand out to us with their usefulness. Some of these links have affiliate codes, but that's not why we're doing this - it really is just nice to point out companies, teams, and individuals who are doing great work and make great products.

Online Tools

Here's a list of "single-purpose" online tools that we often use.

  • Regex101.com - A brilliant regular expression debugger/explainer. Regular Expressions play a part in our user agent parser, and we've found that regex101.com is the best tool to make sure that our regexes are working perfectly.
  • Json Formatter/Beautifier - This handy tool will format the JSON you paste in, right in your browser, without uploading it to their server.

Stickers & Magnets - StickerMule

StickerMule already has a well deserved reputation for delivering fantastic quality swag in the form of stickers, magnets, key chains and so on, and we just want to chime in on how great we think they are too.

Their products are fantastic, but in particular, I'm always impressed by their customer service and the StickerMule Proofing department.

Make your own stickers! StickerMule have provided me with an affiliate link, so if you want to make stickers, magnets, key-chains, and more for your own business, group, or hobby, use our link and get $10 credit!.

Custom Stickers, Die Cut Stickers, Bumper Stickers - Sticker Mule

Email Provider - FastMail

We use and love FastMail. We've used them for several years now for our email accounts and think they're great. The cost is reasonable and I'm totally fine to pay a bit of money each year in order to get increased privacy and better support. If you want to switch to using them, then feel free to use our fastmail referal link - it'll get you 10% off your first year and give us some credit too. Sweet!

Transactional Emails - PostMark

I've found that PostMark is fantastic for the transactional emails we send - API Signups, sending your browser details by email, and so on. We use them to send all our transactional emails and find the weekly reports interesting and useful. They also offer free DMARC monitoring which is handy too. Their support is great and I'm happy to recommend them.

2022 Update: As I'm reading through how to send some broadcast messages to API customers, I just want to remark how fantastic I'm finding their documentation as well; clear, engaging, and relevant. It's really nice. Definitely check them out.

SMS Alerts - Message Bird

I use Message Bird to send important messages and alerts directly to my phone, so that when I'm not near my computer I can still be aware of important events. I haven't needed to use any of their interesting advanced features - I simply use it to send myself SMSs via their API, but it's reliable, cheap, and works great. I was also very impressed by the effort they went to ensure that I was only sending legitimate SMSs and not spammy ones.

Time tracking - Harvest

As a solo founder and operator, I wear all the hats in my business; and as the business grew I became curious about what I spend my time doing. I use Harvest to track all the different types of work I do; from Software Development, Business Management, Customer Service, work on the API, work on the website and so on.

A common use-case for Harvest seems to be for freelancers, tracking time across their various clients - I don't use it in that way, WhatIsMyBrowser.com is my only "client" - but I then have all the different aspects of my work: API/Content Writing/Infrastructure Management/Finance/Website etc which I log time on each day. Then whenever I'm curious, I can see how much time I spent last month on X, Y, or Z.

I like it because it has a very straight-forward UI and it just lets me do what I need to do. I also find that logging my time keeps me more focused on the task at hand - it can be easy to go down "rabbit holes" of work, so by intentionally switching on a timer for each job, I tend to find it keeps me focused. I don't like their "quirky Quote Of The Day about time" on each blank timesheet, but with a little bit of custom CSS it can be hidden.

Use my http://try.hrv.st/3-412708 affiliate link to try out Harvest for yourself. It's very reasonably priced and I recomend it.

Monitoring & Graphing - Grafana, InfluxDB, statsd

I monitor tons of metrics for whatismybrowser.com. The combination of InfluxDB, statsd, and Grafana are indispensible for the monitoring and upkeep of the sites and services we run here.

Cron Job Monitoring - HealthChecks.io

HealthChecks.io - a fantastic cron monitoring service; I get alerted any time a cronjob fails or is delayed. Also has a handy API which I use to display a live readout of alerts and statuses on our project console. It's open source too!

SVG Repo.com

There are a handful of SVG Icons by svgrepo.com that we're very grateful for. Thank you!

Aspect ratio calculator

This is a simple little tool, but it's the best one available. The other tools aren't very clear to me, or don't actually provide what I'm after, but this Aspect Ratio Calculator lets me specify a desired aspect ratio, which dimension I want to calculate based on it (height or width), and specify the other dimension to calculate against, and then it gives it to me nice and neatly.