The market is flooded with great tooling, so I wanted to list a few of my favourites that I’ve used in the past.

Vale

Vale is a linting tool for documentation. Stick it in CI pipeline to check for markdown (or whatever flavour documentation you use), tweak your requirements with styles, and set it to fail on poor grammar.

asciinema

asciinema live records your terminal session and then uploads somewhere providing you with a link to share. Perfect for demo’ing something you’ve made or sharing how to do something without writing endless step-by-steps.

Hugo

This blog is created using Hugo. It is simple to use and fuss free. Updating themes is very straight forward.

adr-tools

I like adr-tools more for encouraging the concept of writing ADRs than the tool itself, but it provides a useful function to get your team writing up decisions.

terraform-docs

If you write any amount of Terraform it’s useful to be able to generate some documentation that describes what your module or manifest does, and it’s variables and outputs. terraform-docs ensures this is straight forward to do, and here is an example of how we used it in GOV.UK.

tfenv

Sticking with Terraform, tfenv makes it easy to switch between versions.

Streisand

Streisand creates a VPN that can be built on multiple cloud providers, and when it’s finished, outputs instructions to pass on to your family and friends. A superbly developed tool.

gof3r

I’m giving gof3r an honourable mention as I used it in the past as a way to stream database dumps straight into an S3 bucket, which means you don’t have to do any pesky disk write operations.