Our favourite tools are powerful yet simple. ngrok is both. It helps us put the backend code we’re developing, on the internet, in a heartbeat.

We’re also sharing Inject - which is an amazing open-source hot-reloading project.

Inject - hot reloading for UIKit, AppKit & SwiftUI

Inject saves you hours by allowing you to see changes without compiling your whole application. Plus it doesn’t require you to add conditional compilation for your production builds - it just works.

What we like

• Saves you hours of time reloading
• Clear documentation

Mergent - serverless background tasks

If you are scheduling long-running and/or recurring tasks like data processing or usage notifications, you would normally need to set up some serious infrastructure as well as debugging and monitoring tools.

But Mergent makes this a breeze. You can tell them when you want tasks to run and then they’ll notify your endpoints when your task is ready to be performed.

A strong use case would be if you're using Firebase/Supabase and need to schedule a background task from your app. 

What we like

• Libraries in TypeScript, JavaScript and Ruby
• Founder James runs the iOS developers’ Slack channel

Mux - video processing API

Let’s say you want to let users edit their videos in your app: you could dive head-first into the complex world of AWS Media Services. Or you could check out Mux which does the hard bits for you. For example, you can clip videos, and add subtitles and watermarks with their simple API.

They have a lot of examples for their video player in Swift and on the backend, they have SDKs in Ruby, Go, Python, PHP, Elixir and Node.

What we like

• Video processing is so difficult - Mux make it easier
• Docs are really nice and explain things in simple terms

ngrok - put your localhost on the internet

ngrok is a globally distributed reverse proxy that puts your localhost on the internet. Let’s say you’re developing an API and running on port 81 of localhost. Simply running:

$ ngrok http 81

You get a URL “on the internet” that forwards requests to your localhost to handle. So you can use this to test mobile apps against your development backend or develop webhook consumers without deploying. This was one of those tools that truly makes us glad to work in tech.

What we like

• Astonishingly simple and just works
• They have a ton of features (encryption, custom domains, load balancing, and identity management).