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10 dev tools recommended by start-up founders

31 Oct 2022

What are the tools that help tech start-ups get the job done? Here are some suggestions.

Dev tools are the unsung heroes behind lots of tech innovations. They make it easier for people with great ideas to create and maintain the tech behind their products and services.

If you’re a budding businessperson or toiling techie yourself, you may have wondered what dev tools tech start-ups swear by.

And SiliconRepublic.com has your back. We asked our Start-up of the Week participants to tell us about their must-have tools.

Here are 10 they recommend.

AWS Amplify

John Hannon, CEO and founder of SalesTier (formerly Gain Grain), recommended AWS Amplify. This helps front-end web and mobile developers build, ship and host full-stack applications on Amazon Web Services.

Hannon said he would not have been able to do so much so quickly without it. “It’s effectively like having a team of engineers setting up services, deploying and scaling them and all from my command line.”

He added that Amplify has many features built in that has made product building “so much easier”.

“It’s allowed me to focus on the core product and outsource the maintenance to AWS.”

Unity

Liltoda founder and CEO Prof Deirdre Murray said she and her team relied heavily on gaming software development platform Unity while they created the CogniTot app.

CogniTot is a tablet-based gamified learning assessment app for toddlers. Without tools like Unity, it would have taken much longer for Liltoda to build and adapt the app, said Murray.

Jira

Jira is part of the suite products owned by Australian software player Atlassian.

Like fellow Atlassian platform Trello, Jira offers Kanban-style notice boards, as well as scrum boards, progress reporting and other workplace management features. Jira is focused on software development, allowing bug tracking and agile project management.

It was recommended by Cardo AI CEO and co-founder Altin Kadareja, as well as Volograms CEO and co-founder Rafael Pagés.

Bitbucket

Many people who find a particular Atlassian product works well for them may dip into the company’s other offerings, too.

Pagés of Volograms said the team are “heavy users of the Atlassian suite” – from Jira to Bitbucket, which is a Git-based source code repository for teams using Jira.

“We use it across all teams to plan our work, monitor the roadmap, track bugs, customer support and as an internal website with all the information related to the company, our processes and our products.”

GitHub

GitHub’s tagline is “where the world builds software”.

Recommended by the team at Cardo AI, the code hosting platform helps developers store and manage their code, track and control changes, and collaborate with others.

PyTorch

Originally developed by Meta AI, open-source machine learning platform PyTorch is used for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing.

It offers lots of resources and tutorials, making it a good option for beginners. Jason Mowles, CEO and co-founder of CergenX, recommends it.

TensorFlow

Another recommendation from the team at CergenX, TensorFlow is an open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence.

“PyTorch and tensorFlow are key to smaller companies making use of AI,” Mowles said. “It would be almost impossible for a small company to develop one’s own AI framework.”

Jupyter

Jupyter is a web-based interactive development environment for notebooks, code and data. It was recommended to us by the team at Cardo AI.

FastAPI

Another recommendation from Cardo AI, this web framework is used for building APIs with the Python 3.7+ programming language, based on standard Python type hints.

MLflow

A final recommendation from Cardo AI’s team, MLflow is an open-source platform designed to manage the machine learning lifecycle. It helps developers consider factors such as experimentation, reproducibility, deployment and a central model registry.

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Blathnaid O’Dea
By Blathnaid O’Dea

Blathnaid O’Dea worked as a Careers reporter until 2024, coming from a background in the Humanities. She likes people, pranking, pictures of puffins – and apparently alliteration.

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