🧰 The Simple Software BDK (Basic Developer Kit)

[RandintN]

🏛️ The Simple Software BDK (Basic Developer Kit)

The BDK is our standardized set of tools designed to support our async-first, results-oriented, and high-clarity culture. These tools are selected to maximize deep work, eliminate ambiguity, and center our entire workflow on GitHub.

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1. Browser: Chrome

• Purpose: Our standard for web browsing, development, and testing.
• Why: Provides a consistent environment and a powerful set of developer tools essential for web-based projects.

2. Core Communication: GitHub

• Purpose: The single source of truth for all work.
• Why: We use the full GitHub suite (Issues, PRs, Projects, Wikis, Discussions) to manage 100% of our communication and project management. This is our central, asynchronous office.

3. Written Clarity: Grammarly

• Purpose: To ensure clear, professional, and accurate written communication.
• Why: In an async model where all communication is written (and in English), clarity is not optional. Grammarly helps eliminate ambiguity and ensures our Issues and PR descriptions are understood correctly the first time.

4. Static Evidence: Flameshot

• Purpose: Creating clear, annotated screenshots.
• Why: Essential for providing evidence. Use it to report bugs, suggest UI changes, or highlight specific areas in a review. Its annotation tools (arrows, text, blur) are mandatory for clear static communication.

5. Dynamic Evidence: OBS Studio

• Purpose: Recording screen and audio for dynamic walkthroughs.
• Why: This is our replacement for live meetings. Instead of scheduling a call to demonstrate a feature or a complex bug, you will record a short video (a "loom-style" recording) with OBS Studio and paste the link into the GitHub issue.

6. Productivity: Ditto Clipboard

• Purpose: An enhanced clipboard manager.
• Why: A simple, powerful tool to boost productivity. It saves your clipboard history (code snippets, issue numbers, URLs) and makes it searchable, saving you time and reducing context switching.

7. Development Hub: IntelliJ Community (or Your Best IDE)

• Purpose: The primary environment for writing and debugging code.
• Why: We recommend IntelliJ Community for its powerful features. However, this is flexible: use the IDE you are most productive in. The goal is deep work, so you should use the tool that best enables you to achieve a flow state.

8. API Testing: API Dog

• Purpose: Designing, testing, and documenting APIs.
• Why: When the "result" we pay for is an API, this is the tool for providing evidence of quality. It's used to test endpoints and confirm that the work is complete and correct before opening a Pull Request.

9. Personal Knowledge: Obsidian

• Purpose: A local-first, personal knowledge base.
• Why: To support your professionalism and efficiency. Use it to take notes, store code snippets, and connect ideas. This "second brain" helps you organize your thoughts and solutions before presenting them in a formal GitHub issue or PR.

10. AI Assistants (Productivity Boost)

• Purpose: To accelerate tasks, debug code, and improve efficiency.
• Why: We actively encourage the use of AI assistants to perform tasks faster and better.
  • Preferred Ecosystem: We prefer tools from the Google ecosystem (e.g., Gemini).
  • Code Leakage: Unless explicitly stated otherwise for a specific project, we are not concerned with code leaks. You are free to paste and refine code in AI prompts.
  • CRITICAL: Security: You must NEVER paste credentials, passwords, API keys, or any production database data into an AI tool. This is a critical security boundary.
  • Check the following document with Best Practices regarding prompt engineering.