In Brief: Essential Tools

8 nov 2006, Simon Strandgaard

For a software company, this is must-have tools!

TOOL1: Subversion (free)

The best system for storing your source code. Its very well supported by other tools: Trac, Tortoise, TextMate.

TOOL2: Rake (free)

Automate everything. I have taken the worst of my manual tasks (tasks that took between 5 and 30 minutes) and automated them, so they now take less than 1 minute to complete. Examples:

» build and upload homepage.
» build, release and zip my program with sample files.
» build documentation (latex).
» run program in a test-environment.

TOOL3: Trac (free)

Keeps track of my time and organize my knowledge.

TOOL4: TextMate (commercial and mac-only)

The ultimative editor (TextMate was the reason I stopped working on my own editor).

TOOL5: Total Commander (commercial and win-only)

I cannot work on windows without TC.

TOOL6: GNU Stow (free and unix-only)

Keep tracks of programs I have installed manually.

TOOL7: Weex (free and unix-only)

Allows me to automate my FTP upload.

TOOL8: SSH (free)

A safe connection through which I can remote control computers and transfer data.