Member-only story
Essential Software Development Tools For Work and Play For 2022
These are the apps and tools I cannot live without
This post contains affiliate links. I make a small commission on purchases made after clicking my affiliate link, at no cost to you. Affiliate links will be marked as such.
Ok, ok, ok. Everybody makes these lists. They are everywhere. I get it. If you don’t want to read another one of these “Tools I use” posts, you’re welcome to click away now. I promise I won’t hold it against you.
Thank you for reading!
I find these lists valuable. It’s interesting to me to see the tools that other people use to do things. I’ve stumbled on awesome tools more than once by reading posts like this, someone might find value here.
What follows are lists of apps and tools I consider to be essential. One list for work, and another list for play.
Work Tools
I spend my day working as a Software Development Lead for a startup. Sometimes I write code, other times I spend times in meetings. I’m an engineer, and the tools below reflect that.
I won’t waste time covering the common tools, know that I use them and they are essential too: Slack, Dropbox, Postman.
Terminal + ohmyzsh
When I am developing, I spend a lot of my time in the terminal. I prefer to use the native mac terminal with ohmyzsh. I’ve tried iTerm and others in the past, but always find my way back to the native terminal.
I maintain my own dotfiles repo which includes a host of aliases, vim configs, and some other fun scripts. This makes moving computers a breeze. It also makes it easy to share settings between work and personal machines.
VSCode and WebStorm
I’ve used many editors throughout my career. From Vim to Notepad++ to SublimeText to Atom to IntelliJ and now, finally, VSCode and WebStorm.
VSCode is my go-to for most situations. I use my own theme, called ss-octopus and have spent years getting it setup exactly the way I like. Recently, though, I’m starting to use WebStorm more and more for large complex projects. It’s a little…
