Wow, I actually got a question from a reader:
“Hey Leah,
I just started following your django adventures as I’m wanting to get into it. Would you mind doing a post on your dev environment (machine, text editor, other favorite tools)? I’m basically looking for best of breed tools and figured I might as well go to the source.Thanks. Keep on rockin.
Scotty”
While I’m tempted to do my best Strong Bad impression here, the question is actually a good one. To be truthful, I often change tools and am always looking for cool new stuff. Comments welcome!
The most important tool I use is Subversion. Actually, any version control tool would work and I’ve had a paper on GIT in my bathroom magazine rack for awhile. If you’re not using version control, DO IT. It doesn’t really matter what size project you’re working on either. I work solo on my side project and while it’s sad to see incremental revisions all by myself (although others DO have commit access cough, cough…), it’s nice to know that if my laptop were stolen or if I made a horrible mistake when I make a horrible mistake, I can easily get at my good code again. Zigversion is my Subversion tool of choice, but TortoiseSVN is lovely too (and available for Windows).
Moving on… I develop on a Mac laptop (yes, that one) and mainly use Coda as my text editor. I was using SubEthaEdit, but the Pownce designer, Daniel, showed me Coda and I’m a sucker for pretty Mac things. I also heard they just released an update today.
I use MySQL Administrator to view and update Pownce’s MySQL database tables on my local machine and just the plain console for running queries or updating the production site. I’ve heard good things about phpMyAdmin but I haven’t been motivated enough to check it out. For CouchDB, I love CouchDBX for the Mac and the web interface.
I’m not sure what else I would call a development tool, but here’s some stuff I love on the Mac:
- Quicksilver, to get at my apps very quickly
- Adium, for lots of chatty goodness across all my chat accounts
- S3 Browser, desktop app for managing S3 accounts
- Colloquy, more chatty IRC goodness
- SSHKeychain, because I’m lazy and forgetful
- Fetch, for ftp because I like watching the dog icon run
- Parallels, to test Pownce in IE
I’m sure I’m forgetting something, but these are the ones I use almost daily. Let me know if I’m missing out on any more good stuff!
