Revisting my Tool Set

It's been over two years since I first wrote about the tools I use regularly as a programmer. Some things have changed, others have persisted. In this post I go through my current tool set with some explanations of why things have either changed or stayed they same.

Some tools haven't changed a bit. Git, SourceTree, VirtualBox and Jenkins are four tools that I still can't live without. Also, my MacBook is now even older, but with a new SSD it seems to have new life.

Change is Inevitable

Before explaining what has changed from my previous list, I should explain that RustProof Labs has completely changed infrastructure from when I wrote that post. In late 2013 everything was still hosted on a cheap Shared Hosting account. PHP and MySQL were everywhere. As our systems grew more complex, I ran into walls and problems with shared hosting and the rest of the stack. To get away from that I took the plunge and migrated to a $5/month Digital Ocean droplet running Debian. By doing this I ended up saving over 35% each month, plus I had a LOT more bandwidth, storage and power, and I could install whatever I decided I needed.

Part of the push to a VPS was when I started using Jira as my bug tracker. Another factor was that Jira didn't run on MySQL so I started using PostgreSQL instead. The final straw for MySQL was using WordPress, which I ended up replacing with my own custom built blog.

New Tools

The most notable tool I've started using is Docker. It has provided me with such agility and power without introducing a major overhead. Our entire infrastructure is in Docker other than Nginx which is still running on the base VPS.

• Docker
• Jupyter notebooks
• PgAdmin
• Sublime Text (first 2, now 3)
• QGIS
• JOSM

No Longer Used

Here are a few tools I previously used daily that have been "put away". Working on a Mac excludes me from using Notepad++, and without MySQL and PHP the rest of these just weren't needed anymore.

• Mantis Bug Tracker
• NetBeans IDE
• Notepad ++
• Phing
• Kompozer
• MySQLWorkbench

Summary

It has been interesting seeing how my tool set has changed since my first post on this, I'll be curious to see what happens in another 2 years.