Popular productivity tools

Productivity tool is bit of a vague term. On one hand, almost every open source code package that has been released and is available online is a kind of productivity booster – it provides ready-to-use solutions to some problem, so that no one needs to spend time on it (ideally speaking). On the other hand, you could say that the whole of Python is about productivity—and both are undoubtedly true. Almost everything in this language and community surrounding it seems to be designed in order to make software development as productive as possible.

This creates a positive feedback loop. Since writing code is fun and easy, a lot of programmers use their free time to create tools that make it even easier and fun. And this fact will be used here as a basis for a very subjective and non-scientific definition of a productivity tool – a piece of software that makes development easier and more fun.

By nature, productivity tools focus mainly on certain elements of the development process, such as testing, debugging, and managing packages, and are not core parts of products that they help to build. In some cases, they may not even be referred to anywhere in the project's codebase, despite being used on a daily basis.

The most important productivity tools, pip and venv, were already discussed earlier in this chapter. Some of them have packages for specific problems, such as profiling and testing, which have their own chapters in this book. This section is dedicated to other tools that are really worth mentioning, but have no specific chapter in this book where they could be introduced.