# 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](https://todoist.com) as a project to work on with a short description. I used to use Trello for this. Before coming up with [CleanRepos](https://clean-repos.herokuapp.com/), the idea came with a "Repo Deleter" tag.

##### * Dropbox Paper

[Paper](https://paper.dropbox.com/) 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](https://www.mamp.info/en/) but now trying out [Valet](https://laravel.com/docs/5.8/valet).

### Version Control

Everybody uses Git... no? I used to use Bitbucket when there were no private repositories on [GitHub](https://github.com) but now, GitHub for everything. Public and private.

### Domain names

For a long time I used [Maddogdomains](https://www.maddogdomains.com/) for my domain name management and I still have a couple domains there. But now, I have moved to [Namecheap](https://www.namecheap.com/) and they are my go-to.

### Hosting

I don't do much of shared hosting anymore. When I used to, I used [QServers](https://www.qservers.net/) and [Gigalayer](https://gigalayer.com/) for clients. Moved to Azure because of BizSpark benefits but that's exhausted now. I use [Heroku](https://www.heroku.com/) (free) for my quick deployments and then [DigitalOcean](https://www.digitalocean.com/) (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.