The Developer Toolkit I Wish I Had In 2015

I found an old USB drive last week. Buried in it was a folder called "dev-tools" that I'd apparently been carrying around since 2015. Brace yourselves: it contained a pirate copy of a commercial text editor, three different regex testers I'd downloaded as standalone HTML files, a Python script that just base64-encoded whatever you pasted into the terminal, and a bookmarklet that let you view page source in a popup. It was like archaeological evidence of a more primitive era of development. And you know what? I was proud of that USB drive at the time. I thought I was organized. Looking back, the developer tooling landscape in 2015 was genuinely hostile to productivity. Everything required installation, configuration, or both. Want to format a blob of JSON you got from an API? Open your editor, install a plugin, restart the editor, paste the JSON, run the command, hope it doesn't crash. Want to test a regex? Download one of fifty RegexTesters.exe files from the internet and hope it's not malware. Need to base64-encode a string? Open your terminal, remember the syntax for \x60base64\x60 vs \x60openssl enc -base64\x60 depending on which OS you're on, and hope you get it right. HTML preview was its own special kind of pain. I'd save a snippet to a .html file, open it in the browser, realize a tag was wrong, tab back to the editor, fix it, save, tab back to the browser, refresh. Every single time. The context switching alone probably cost me hours per week. Now? All four of these things live in my browser tabs. JSON formatter handles minified JSON from any API and lets me collapse and expand nodes like a tree. I use it probably ten times a day. Base64 encode/decode is one of those things you don't realize you need until you have it — decoding JWT tokens, checking if something is actually base64, encoding credentials for quick API tests. It takes two seconds. Regex tester is the one I appreciate most, honestly. In 2015 I'd write regex by trial and error, testing against some weird desktop app that had its own slightly-different regex flavor. The browser-based ones today show you matches in real time, highlight capture groups, explain what each part of the pattern does, and even let you test against multiple strings at once. I went from "I'll just use .includes() and avoid regex" to actually writing proper patterns. The difference is night and day. HTML preview is sneaky-useful. I use it when I'm iterating on email templates or small UI components. Write the markup in one pane, see the rendered result in another. No file system, no manual refresh. It's like CodePen without the account creation and social features I don't need. Here's what I think happened. In 2015, the browser was still seen as a consumption device. The tools we used for production work lived outside it. Somewhere around 2018 or 2019, that flipped. The browser became the runtime not just for our apps, but for our development workflow itself. WebAssembly, service workers, and better JavaScript performance meant you could run serious tooling entirely in the client. And now we're here. I have a USB drive from 2015 with cobbled-together tools. I have a browser tab in 2026 that does all of it better, faster, and with no installation. If I could go back and tell 2015 me one thing, it wouldn't be about frameworks, languages, or architecture. It would be: "Stop carrying that USB drive around. Open a browser." Though honestly, 2015 me wouldn't have believed me. He was too busy trying to remember the flags for \x60openssl enc\x60.