Tru Narla
Find yours in the Settings dialog
Tru Narla
Find yours in the Settings dialog
Tru Narla is a developer (and Arc member since July 2022) who's made her mark at places like Square and Discord. These days, she's flying solo as a freelancer and making fun tech content, perfectly blending her love of programming with her creative side.
Check out the ten tools (cheat codes, really) she relies on in her day-to-day creative coding journey.
For a spark of inspiration
Every great coding project starts with inspiration. Pinterest is Tru's goldmine for finding inspiration, even though she admits it's a "blessing and a curse" thanks to its endless ideas (and endless scroll). Still, it's her go-to for visualizing ideas to help get pen to paper (or keyboard to monitor).
Then, if you're on the hunt for the little details to put a pretty bow on your projects, Awwwards highlights the latest and greatest in web design. Tru scans it for micro-interactions and CSS animations to elevate her video ideas and coding projects.
For learning, coding, and managing projects
GitHub is Tru's best friend for organizing all her code and keeping everything neatly in one digital home. Plus, it has some solid integrations that make pulling your inspiration from around the web easy and seamless. She keeps repositories with pockets of code to reference or share. When it's time to test ideas quickly, Codepen is like a playground for trying out her wildest CSS experiments on the fly -- it makes vision into reality, fast.
The MDN Web Docs is a great resource for HTML, CSS, and JS and has become Tru's bible for all things web development. As she says, "Are you even a web developer if you don't check MDN every day?"
For design
Figma is Tru's MVP for design tasks like video thumbnails and app mockups. The flexibility comes in clutch because you don't have to leave to get a ton of design work done. As Tru puts it, "Figma is my favorite design tool to use, period."
Tru's also been practicing 3D design, and ThreeJs is a triple threat with different points of inspiration, great library, and solid documentation.
For animation
GSAP and Framer Motion are Tru's favorites for animation. She geeks out over GSAP's animation libraries for JS and Framer's seamless React integration.
For tying it all together
VSCode is Tru's go-to editor for coding. It perfectly integrates with GitHub, with great shortcuts like opening the VS website instantly by hitting the "." when you're in a GitHub repo.
So there you have it - a peek into Tru's world! Each tool has its place in her creative process, allowing her to do her best work. If you'd like to revisit the tools that Tru can’t live without, visit this Arc Folder.