Overview

Here's a rundown organized by role.

• Direction
• Design
• Frontend
• Backend
• Others

Direction

• Asana
  • We used to use ZenHub
• ZenHub
  • Being tied to the repository is simply convenient
  • The kanban board is very handy for status management, but there are a lot of properties to configure, which sometimes made it hard to handle
  • We ended up just looking directly at GitHub Issues
• Instagantt
  • As a Gantt chart tool, its feature set is currently just about right
  • Though Japanese input support can sometimes be a bit disappointing
• Miro
  • Quick to put together, highly functional, and easy to use UI
  • That said, since it can do just about anything, it's hard to judge when exactly to use Miro
  • We use it for making flow diagrams
• Notion
  • Being able to write up documents in Markdown and export to PDF made it invaluable for requirements documents and other document management
  • Very easy to use in terms of design and extensibility
  • Tables look a bit awkward, so they don't seem to get used much
  • The quote style has a font size that ends up oddly large for some reason — personally would like that fixed (Designer: Chihara)

Design

• Figma
  • AutoLayout, something every design data creator has dreamed of, was implemented. The build-and-check cycle is incredibly fast.
  • In terms of ease of use for building websites and web services, Figma is currently the best
  • Its handling of path data is disappointingly weaker than Illustrator's. For logos, custom lettering, and pictograms, we still use Illustrator.
• STUDIO
  • I wrote about it here.
  • A very well-crafted product that covers all the small details — ease of use, support for various devices, meta information for SEO, and more. Looking forward to its CMS features.
  • No-code tools might become more popular going forward. We're keeping an eye on these:
    • Glide
    • Universe
    • AppSheet is also interesting

Frontend

• OpenAPI
  • The generator is handy
  • A life with types
• GraphQL (Apollo)
  • Being able to change the content of requests as needed is nice
  • That said, we haven't quite reaped the benefits yet
  • Being able to develop while looking at the schema in the Playground is nice
• Nuxt.js
  • Basically our go-to
  • Want to become able to use other frameworks too
• Storybook
  • Useful for checking designs... or so we thought?
  • We didn't really get much benefit out of it. We'd like to operate it more efficiently, paired with better component design.
• Jest
  • Writing tests on the frontend too. That's a step toward happiness.
• Codecov
  • Nice to be able to see the rate of test coverage
  • Tools like this tend to give a sense of satisfaction just from adopting them, so we want to keep actively using it

Backend

• OpenAPI
  • Managing it purely as documentation is painful
  • Schema-first development — testing APIs and generating client-side code starting from the schema — made things go a lot more smoothly
  • For Rails projects, using committee-rails makes it easy to adopt
    • Wrote about it here
• GraphQL (gqlgen)
  • As far as gqlgen goes, being able to do schema-first development was great
    • The frontend can also generate code from the schema, and since you can just look at the GraphQL Playground, there's no need to keep updating documentation
  • Support and implementation approaches differ depending on the language and framework you use, so it's quite a lot of trial and error to implement it in a way that fits your situation
  • You see information like "we're using gqlgen," but we'd like to know more about what kind of structure and implementation other projects are using
  • There are also areas where you wonder how to handle things that used to be straightforward with REST APIs
    • File downloads felt inconvenient
  • Whether to adopt it seems to depend on the project

Others

• CircleCI
  • Continued to rely on it
  • We generally make API documentation and database schemas that we want to share mid-development viewable via Artifacts
  • Using Orbs well lets you keep the config nice and clean
• GitHub Actions
  • It's now officially released, and we've recently started using it little by little
  • Easy to set up quickly for simple tests, and easy to use
  • Would be nice if Artifacts became viewable on the web
• Terraform
  • Depends on the project, but since the infrastructure configuration required as a baseline tends to have a lot in common, it saves a lot on initial setup
  • Also makes it much smoother to create separate development and production environments
• Serverless
  • We generally use it whenever something seems solvable with a small Lambda function
    • Planning to use it beyond AWS as well
  • Since there tend to be a lot of related resources, incorporating it into CI/CD makes managing how much permission to grant a bit of a hassle
• JetBrains editors
  • We used to be almost entirely on VSCode, but started using GoLand when we began writing Go, and now use WebStorm, RubyMine, and others depending on the project

Besides the above, we use various other tools like Google Drive and Slack in our day-to-day work. We want to keep updating our workflow continuously to improve efficiency and accuracy even a little.