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Tools we use daily: setups, tricks and battle-tested automations.
Retool and Appsmith cut internal tool development time from weeks to days. Retool leads the commercial SaaS market with polished components and enterprise permissions; Appsmith brings open source self-hosting at low or zero cost. Low-code works for dashboards, forms, and simple workflows, and breaks on complex logic or highly custom interfaces.
Flux CD and ArgoCD are the two CNCF-graduated GitOps tools for deploying to Kubernetes with Git as the source of truth. ArgoCD offers a centralised visual UI that manages several clusters from one instance, while Flux is a set of Kubernetes-native controllers with built-in image automation. Neither choice is wrong: it depends on your team and use case.
Backstage is the open-source platform from Spotify for building Internal Developer Platforms: a web portal (Node.js + React) that centralises service catalogs, scaffolding, and technical documentation. Adopted by Netflix, American Airlines, and hundreds of companies since 2020, it needs 1-3 dedicated engineers and pays off for organisations with more than 50 developers.
With quantization, model weights are stored with fewer bits (4, 5, or 8 instead of 16), so Llama 2 13B shrinks from 26 GB to about 7.5 GB. With llama.cpp it runs on an ordinary 16GB-RAM laptop with no dedicated GPU, and the quality loss is smaller than intuition suggests.
OpenTofu is the community fork of Terraform, born in 2023 after HashiCorp switched to the Business Source License. With full file compatibility and Linux Foundation governance, it is the legally safe alternative for organisations with strict open-source policies or for those building products on Terraform.
Podman is the Docker alternative with no central daemon and no root privileges required. Each container runs as a direct child process of the launching user, with rootless support since version 1.0 in 2019. If a container escapes, it does not gain host root. When Podman makes sense and what real differences to expect.
Trivy and Grype are the two leading open-source tools for container image scanning in CI/CD pipelines. Both detect CVEs in OS packages and language dependencies with less than 5% coverage difference. Trivy stands out for IaC scanning; Grype natively integrates the SBOM workflow with Syft.
The Grafana stack combines three open source projects: Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics. All three keep data in object storage (S3/GCS) with a minimal index instead of indexing everything like Elasticsearch, which cuts cost sharply at high volume and lets you correlate metric, log, and trace from a single Grafana panel.
nerdctl is a Docker-compatible CLI that talks directly to containerd, the standard Kubernetes runtime since dockershim was removed in 2022. It adds rootless support by default, encrypted images with ocicrypt, lazy-pulling, and native CNI. It fits best where containerd already runs, though Docker Engine still wins on advanced Compose and Swarm.
Stable Diffusion XL marks a leap in open-licence image generation quality. What changes versus SD 1.5/2.1, the hardware requirements, and when to pick SDXL over Midjourney or DALL-E 3 for your workflow.
ChatGPT plugins let the model invoke external services through an OpenAPI specification. Three months after launch, the ecosystem has around 500 plugins with a clear pattern: they work well for live data lookup and internal API exposure, but show friction in multi-plugin orchestration and real-money transactions.
Cómo Figma pasó de ser una herramienta de diseño a convertirse en el lenguaje común entre diseño, producto e ingeniería.
Cerebras-GPT is a family of 7 open-source language models, ranging from 111 million to 13 billion parameters, trained by Cerebras Systems on its CS-2 processors with the standard GPT-3 architecture. Released on Hugging Face and GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, they suit fine-tuning, research, and local inference, though they understand only English.
Qdrant is the pick when full control and performance in self-hosted setups matter most; Pinecone wins for fully managed SaaS with zero operations; Weaviate stands out when native embeddings and hybrid search built into one pipeline add real value. This comparison covers architecture, quantisation, filtering, and RAG use cases to help you decide based on budget and control needs.
Microsoft PC Manager is a free, official Microsoft tool that brings temporary-file cleanup, Windows startup management, one-click access to Windows Defender, and a visual disk-usage map into a single panel. It runs on Windows 10 and Windows 11, but it does not replace a full antivirus or dedicated data-recovery tools.
GitHub Copilot is a coding assistant from GitHub and OpenAI that suggests code in real time inside the editor, trained on billions of lines of public code. It speeds up repetitive tasks such as tests, boilerplate, and documentation, but its suggestions always need human review before reaching production.
RustDesk is an open-source remote desktop tool released under the AGPL-3.0 licence, with more than 113,000 stars on GitHub. It offers end-to-end encryption, clients for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android, and the option to run your own signalling server with Docker instead of relying on RustDesk's public infrastructure.
