How we boost productivity with Raycast

At incident.io, we believe in using the best tools available to help streamline our processes and make our day-to-day more efficient. One of the tools that we use to help with this goal is Raycast, which we've been using since its v1 launch.

We appreciate the freedom to use the tools that we think will work best for us, and take the time to invest in making these tools work seamlessly with our processes.

Here, I'll dive into the specific ways Raycast has improved our workflows and why we've enjoyed using the product so much.

See: Why I joined an engineering team of 6 → Pace

Building extensions

Raycast has become to integral to our workflows that we've created specific internal extensions for it to further streamline our processes. These are often niche tasks, however they spark joy each time we use one. These include:

1. Searching for GCP Pub/Sub topics
2. Searching for an incident.io customer by name or ID
3. Generating Markdown for GitHub pull requests

These live within a private GitHub repo, and it's worth highlighting that the time taken to create and maintain has been minimal—we really appreciate the level of support we get from the Slack community and documentation.

See: Building great developer experience at a startup

Our favourite features

Alongside the extensions we have built ourselves, each engineer has their personal favourite core Raycast features for their daily development workflow:

• Rory (Product Engineer) uses create-markdown-table.js to quickly generate Markdown tables with X columns and Y rows (no one enjoys rolling these by hand), and also switched from using the Spectacle macOS app for window management to Raycast (with the same key bindings).
• We all use the emoji picker many, many times a day as they are a core part of how we communicate on Slack and within our product.
• Lisa (Tech Lead) uses app shortcuts to quickly navigate between apps from the keyboard.
• Alex (Product Engineer) has mapped CMD+SHIFT+D to open his local development app, and uses a variety of script commands to optimise his development workflow.

Design matters

We care deeply about the design of the tools we use. That's why we want to give a shoutout to the Raycast team for creating such a beautiful and functional product.

From the sleek website to the intuitive macOS app, Raycast's design is truly remarkable.

We're not alone in admiring great design; we're also huge fans of both Notion and Linear, which demonstrate that beautiful design is worth striving for.

For us, attention to design isn't just a cosmetic concern; it's a fundamental part of building tools that people actually want to use.

In our experience, the best tools are not only useful and reliable, but also a pleasure to interact with. So, to the Raycast team and all the other designers out there striving to make useful tools more beautiful, thank you!

Productivity squared

I just want to say that we truly love Raycast and the impact it has had on our daily workflows.

It's one of the most useful tools we have and it has had a significant impact on our productivity. So, thank you, Raycast team, for building such an extraordinary tool!