An organized 2022? Start with your browser!

This blog is meant to make the life of a (SAP) developer much easier.
I guess I’m not the only one who tries to clean his chrome tabs but after a few hours it’s already a mess.
The size of the favicons is resized to the minimum and the text isn’t readable anymore. I’ll show you how I prevent making mistakes by using a simple tool.

Every Acorel developer works with different (test) environments to make a great product tested against the highest standards before it goes live. A side effect that comes with this, is that you have the same pages, same tabs and same favicons for multiple environments. You can think at the storefront, the backoffice, SmartEdit, HAC, Swagger and Solr. Imagine all those, multiplied by the number of environments. Not that long ago I accepted the fact that I had to be careful with my actions on the different environments. Because if you don’t, bad things may happen.

• You’re doing some “trial and error” stuff with content pages in SmartEdit and find out you erased it from production, or, that funny cat image that you always use is now on top of the homepage.
• Nobody wants to start a full Solr index on the Production environment when you just wanted to try something on your local machine.
• You’re testing your cool new feature that allows customers to buy stuff for a promotional price and you get calls from the business / department how it’s possible that the most expensive bathtubs are sold for just one euro.
• You are the one that thought you bought that expensive bathtub on your local environment and the next day the truck driver rings your doorbell to deliver it.

Well, you get the point. I can go on with this for days.
But in the near past I found out the basic feature of Google Chrome itself to group your tabs together and give them a color and a name. Maybe you already do this or do you use some other tool to fix this problem.
Otherwise, look at your tabs now and right click on it!

You will see:

I gave my local environment group the color grey: “Nothing to see here”.
The Development environment group is green: “Not your local machine, but a safe area to test your work before assigning your Jira tickets to the QA team”.
The Staging environment group is yellow: “Are you sure you want to change things here!?“
And of course, the production environment group is red: “Be careful what you do here!”

This is what my browser now looks like and I feel organized. Besides that, I save a lot of time not hovering the tabs to check the URL, which benefits productivity. Now I can make more great stuff, with less risk in less time!