Introducing Dev Army Knife
Tags: news, product, productivity, tooling
Published: 2022-04-17 11:15:37

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canonical_url: https://blog.hackersreboot.tech/dev-army-knife
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Developers are the ones who are the driving power behind websites. However, for a long time, developers have been facing a lot of issues with the task they are supposed to do. Every time they face a situation like this, they have to stop what they are doing and start looking for a suitable tool to do that particular task. This toolkit aims at solving this issue and helps developers to get their work done.

# What is the Dev Army Knife?
> Introducing the Dev Army Knife, a toolkit for developers to do various tasks. Whether it may be generating a QR code, editing a few lines of code without the editor or joining two words without any delays and with high quality, the Dev Army Knife is here to help you. Inspired by the Swiss Army Knife, this handy toolkit includes many useful tools for developers to use in day-to-day tasks.  
> From [The Docs](https://dakdocs.hackersreboot.tech/)  

Dev Army Knife is a toolkit for developers (frankly anyone) to do various day-to-day tasks. It is like a Swiss Army Knife for developers, hence the name. It provides you with a lot of tools to simplify your workflow and increase productivity. At the time of writing, it has about 10 tools. It also gives you access to a tool called *devTools Wiki*. It is very helpful in getting a brief overview of various tools and help you choose a tech stack.

# Where can I find it?
The main application is hosted by good folks at [Netlify](https://netlify.com) over here:    

https://devarmyknife.hackersreboot.tech

The docs(also hosted by Netlify) are over at:

https://dakdocs.hackersreboot.tech


The Github repository for the application is over at:

https://github.com/Arpan-206/DevArmyKnife

The Github Repository for the docs can be found at:

https://github.com/Arpan-206/DAKDocs

# How Dev Army Knife Rocks?
Dev Army Knife provides you with a minimalistic, dark-themed interface. It is meant to get out of the way for you to use it freely by not over-complicating things. We also place no trackers or advertisements, it is a true non-profit project. Most of the processing is done on the client-side which means rarely any data reaches us or any third party and the processing is ridiculously fast because there are no delays or redundancy. It also allows you to host an instance of it yourself.

# What all features does Dev Army Knife have?  
### Tailored🕴️
Dev Army Knife is a tool made by a developer (high school student 😉) for developers. So, it has been tailored to developers (at least me lol).

### Dark Mode 🕶️
The whole app is in Dark Mode. Like, who even use Light Mode nowadays anyway.

### Fast ⚡
Almost all of the app is rendered Statically (except the Wiki and keypair-generation). Also, all the tools are client-side, so no sending requests or server overloading etc. Also, our friends over at Netlify are known for being fast.

### Mobile-Friendly 📱
The Application is designed to be very mobile-friendly. This goes a long way in maintaining usability across devices. Especially with things like Code Editors.

### Self Hostable 💻 
You can host the web app yourself if you don't trust me or my providers. (But, seriously, why would you not).

### Secure 🔐
The app is very secure since no data is stored with us or a big corporation. Yes, no trackers, no ads, no data harvesting.

# PWA Support
The toolkit is a PWA (Progressive Web App). It can be installed just like a native application but is very light. You can use most of the core tools offline after installing the PWA. I worked very hard to include this because a lot of people face a problem like weak connections. This adds to accessibility for the user and a rich native-like experience.

# My Favourite Modules
out of all of the tools provide some are my absolute favourites, for example, I enjoy playing the [Trivia Quiz](https://devarmyknife.hackersreboot.tech/fun/quiz) and the [QR Code Generator](https://devarmyknife.hackersreboot.tech/generators/qrcode) is what I use a lot with various customisations.

# What hit me that I built this project?
Well, to be honest, this is a project idea that was in my mind for a long time. I wanted to create a suite of tools that I use quite a lot and thought other people also would. So yeah this is one of those projects which you want to build but don't know how or think if it would be worth the trouble. Then when this Hackathon was announced I immediately got an adrenaline rush. I have my exams in a week and yet I spent around 8-10 hours/day building this coz why not. 

# How did I build it?

> **Warning**- I might have gone into too much detail, but I use my blogs to pour myself into words so it is what it is. Feel free to skip tho. 

I was itching to learn Next.js and Tailwind. I am a mostly Python user but I wanted to learn JS and React. I went through the amazing courses on [freeCodeCamp](https://www.freecodecamp.org/). But for learning Next and Tailwind, I thought it would be better to learn by building, so that's what I did. I used this project as an excuse to learn them. I first looked up if Netlify even supports Next.js and to my delight it did. Not only that, it does so without any additional configuration on my end, so I guess that is a plus. It took me more than a week of getting up, attending classes, working on it till about 10 PM and going to sleep to get it to a presentable state along with the documentation and all of that. But, now boy am I proud!

# How and where is it deployed?
Y'all already know that I deployed everything on Netlify since you have come this far, even if you didn't you certainly do now. Elaborating on that, I first deployed it under a free account on Netlify and it is quite nice for a free tier. Then I found out that they have a great plan for open-source projects. So I thought why not give it a try. And they approved it very quickly. So there we are.

# How do I actually use it tho?
Just go to [the app](https://devarmyknife.hackersreboot.tech/) and select the tool you want to use and Voila! It's that simple. If you want to know in detail how a particular tool works, you are most welcome to read our [documentation](https://dakdocs.hackersreboot.tech/) and trust me it is not boring.

# How to host it myself?
You are more than welcome to host it yourself. For that you have 2 options:

1. Host it directly on a server. You can follow the instructions over [here](https://dakdocs.hackersreboot.tech/self-host/#method-1-directly-running-the-server).
2. Using Docker. You can follow [these instructions](https://dakdocs.hackersreboot.tech/self-host/#method-2-using-docker).

# Open Source Commitment
Our entire codebase (including the docs) is entirely open source under the MIT License. We are welcome to contributions to the project and the docs. But, we ask only that you adhere to the project's [Code of Conduct](https://dakdocs.hackersreboot.tech/code_of_conduct/) and [Contributing Guide](https://dakdocs.hackersreboot.tech/contributing/). 

# View on ProductHunt

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/dev-army-knife

# Final Words...
Thank You for reading! I want you to think of Dev Army Knife as a Swiss Army Knife for your daily dev tasks. 
 
I would love to hear/read your views on the Project. Did you enjoy using it? What tool do you use the most? Any feature requests or complaints? Feel free to mail them to me at [arpan@hackersreboot.tech](mailto:arpan@hackersreboot.tech) or join [our Discord Server](https://discord.gg/psdPFfjwrN). You can also join [discussions on Github](https://github.com/Arpan-206/DevArmyKnife/discussions). Take Care and see you in the next one!