My Development Platforms and Tools

My Development Platforms and Tools

I find building to be fun and also happens to be the best way I learn. This involves a lot of experiences, trying out new stuff and at the same time constantly looking for better alternatives.

Throughout my adventures, I've had to make choices on tools, technologies and platforms I use to have my ideas come to life. Here they are:

Ideation

* Todoist

Once an idea comes through my mind, no matter how unstructured it is, it usually comes with a default name to call it, this name can be changed later, but it helps me quickly add it to Todoist as a project to work on with a short description. I used to use Trello for this. Before coming up with CleanRepos, the idea came with a "Repo Deleter" tag.

* Dropbox Paper

Paper comes in really handy for pretty much everything these days - writing articles and also writing out thoughts. Once I am ready to dive deeper into an idea I have, I open a blank Paper page and start typing how I picture it to work, the flow, technologies and resources I'll need and also a basic idea of what pages should be available.

Local Environment

For a long time, most of my career actually, I have just preferred to go the easy way out when it comes to setting up my local dev environment. I've tried a lot of tools as needed but I've mostly settled with using a stack. I am currently on Mac so I went with MAMP but now trying out Valet.

Version Control

Everybody uses Git... no? I used to use Bitbucket when there were no private repositories on GitHub but now, GitHub for everything. Public and private.

Domain names

For a long time I used Maddogdomains for my domain name management and I still have a couple domains there. But now, I have moved to Namecheap and they are my go-to.

Hosting

I don't do much of shared hosting anymore. When I used to, I used QServers and Gigalayer for clients. Moved to Azure because of BizSpark benefits but that's exhausted now. I use Heroku (free) for my quick deployments and then DigitalOcean (paid) when needed.

Platforms I've built for

  • Web
  • Windows
  • Android
  • iOS
  • FirefoxOS
  • Windows Phone
  • WordPress Plugin
  • Browser extension - Chrome & Opera

I'll continue to update these with different sections as I come across them and if you need me to clarify any section especially those not mentioned here, feel free to drop a comment.