25 tools every new developer needs | Hacker News Reader

25 tools every new developer needs

blog.courseforward.com

10 pointsmichaelq14 comments

"There's a reason most people in tech use Macs: most open source tools and frameworks were developed for OSX, then ported to Windows or Linux. "

What cloud does this guy live on?

Thanks for your feedback. I have no quantitative evidence to back up this statement so I will amend it. There are many reasons most developers (certainly in the Bay Area) prefer OSX to Windows or desktop Linux.

How would you feel about: "Macs combine the user-friendliness of Windows with the Unix environment necessary to run most tools and frameworks."

There is a whole range of essential tools not available for OS X. For example, none of Xilinx or Altera tools runs on OS X.

Obviously the initial comment about most developers using macs was pretty dumb but as a mac user, I do use a lot of these things. Maybe it should be titled "tools for new developers using macs"?

I don't use sourcetree, alfred, jumpcut, spectacle, screen hero. I also don't think there's any special dependency of a developer on something like file vault or time machine. In fact, using git and a remote server naturally backs up nearly all I do. Also, not sure why a developer would have a special need for lastpass or incognito mode?

Ok, so I use SOME of these things. :)

Lastpass would be useful for dealing with multiple password of multiple versions of the product you're working on. On my team we use Keepass and we can store and easily share passwords for all of our environments.

Incognito is useful for testing sites with cookies.

Rather than using Jumpcut, I'd recommend the alfred plugin for clipboard history.

http://support.alfredapp.com/features:clipboard

"most open source tools and frameworks were developed for OSX, then ported to Windows or Linux"

gcc?

Same thing again. "Coder" is always a "web coder" now. That's annoying.

Do you do embedded/native development? Which tools do you use for that that aren't mentioned in the blog post?

Many developers do not ever touch anything mac, do not use IDEs other than Emacs or VIM, do not care about browsers, etc.

So a title is extremely misleading. For a large proportion of the developers most of the listed tools are pretty useless.

And not to mention that "most open source tools and frameworks were developed for OSX, then ported to Windows or Linux" is very far from being correct anywhere outside of the tiny web-development world.

Other than Vim or Emacs (which I do mention in my post), which tools do you use? And which tools would you recommend for beginners?

Besides git or mercurial, there is no single set of tools which can be universally usable across the developers' profiles range. There is a huge diversity of needs, cultures and methodologies out there.

I wish I had more hands so I could give this post four thumbs down! -Rick James

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