We all want to become better developers of course. How? To become better at anything, we have to take some time for experimentation to get experience. By experimenting, I don’t just think about practicing. You need to learn new techniques and tools, which will help your work in the future. Imagine your life without Maven, CocoaPods, Gradle, npm, Excel, IDEs, etc. After you picked up the knowledge these tools spare a lot of time for you.

Learn new tools

The first and maybe the most important lesson to know new tools. As Claudio Fernández-Aráoz (a top global expert on talent and leadership) put it, “The question is not whether your company’s employees and leaders have the right skills; it’s whether they have the potential to learn new ones”.So you must try new tools.

To spare much more time for yourself you should get to know Respresso, which is a universal asset management tool. If you’re into origin stories, you can read them out here. Before Respresso developers must get their hands dirty to insert, modify, or remove localization texts, images, colors, etc. These days we’re lucky because Respresso simplifies asset handling and allows people to edit them without any programmer knowledge. So you can easily outsource these boring tasks to other team members.

D.R.Y. principle (don’t repeat yourself)

Respresso gives you the advantage to handle all assets in one place. We designed this web UI to be intuitive and easy to use. We hide most of the boring technical details from non-technical team members and we automate all of those tasks.

When you uploaded, modified, deleted assets, Respresso automatically generates all the necessary platform-specific files ( eg. android vector drawable, ios pdf and web JSON files etc.). Respresso automatically generates these files for you, so you don’t have to.

Auto-sync updates instead of manually downloading

You can download all the assets from https://app.respresso.io but why would you do that? It is boring, wastes your time, and can be automated. We created sync clients for Android, iOS, and npm based web frameworks (like React, Angular, Vue.JS and VanillaJS). Please read the tutorials or follow our youtube channel to connect the clients to the Respresso server.

Embedded version control

Respresso comes with a versioning feature, which enables you to create different versions of assets and connect them to major releases of our software. You can easily lock your asset’s version and reuse it later, eg. in case of an emergency deployment or rollback situation where you need an older version of your asset files.

Increase your productivity

An honored programmer often doesn’t have much more knowledge than an average one. He or she honored because his (or her) knowledge is deeper in useful tools and he (or she) can use them (eg. automated code generation). Take time to dive into tools and try to find scenarios when it is useful for you. Use your experience and don’t reinvent the wheel. If you notice something bad try to make it better. Let’s see a simple example.

There is a simple placeholder text.  How many milliseconds do you need to write this sentence? 

I would like to get wether forecast.

5 or 6 sec? OK. Add a key for it.

profile.text.checkbox_forecast (approx. 5 sec)

To summarize, you need 10 seconds to write a localization text into a localization file in one platform. How many localization texts do you have in a small application? 200 – 600? Let’s calculate with 400. 

400 * 10 = 4000 sec, this is 67 mins per platform.

How many times do you test it? Usually, a tester doesn’t read localization texts in a source code. They test it manually and try to verify every scenario. At the end of a scenario, a tester finds the mistake in the text (wether, did you find it?) and writes a ticket into the issue tracker. The team has to schedule the fix into the next sprint and you dear reader have to solve a 10-sec problem again. How much time had been spent for a 10-sec task? Hours, days?

Don’t do it anymore, use Respresso, and eliminate these time killer tasks. Respresso can be used by every tester as well. They can read the localization texts during the whole development cycle or they can fix the mistypes without developer assistance.

Your testers or anybody outside of the development team can build a new version of an application with the help of Respresso if you or your firm use CI & CD software.

Use live localization

Imagine that you can translate your app with a real-time localization tool and you can check a translated sentence immediately in a real context. If you are interested in this topic please click here to read more.

Agility for asset management

Nowadays most IT companies are very agile and they must be open to customer change requirements. It usually means that the designer has to make a new design and generate eg. new images. After that the designers finalized the design, developers deep dive the source code and replace the old assets to new. What’s wrong with this? Developers solved the problem twice. 

Do you hate pixel-fighting too? We created Respresso for you and for your team. Allow for designers to change the required assets immediately in Respresso and you can lean back. Respresso works instead of you through sync clients. These clients are able to update assets in the source code automatically.

Share your knowledge

The third important quality of a great developer is frequent knowledge sharing. We’re working in teams so we have to think as a team. From time to time, you go on vacation, and probably you don’t want to get a work-related call because one of your coworkers doesn’t know something or needs your help to solve a problem. The best solution is knowledge sharing to avoid these situations. If you like this post please share it with your colleagues and friends.