What programming tools could you not live without?

MatteRB26 · 21 Aug 2021 at 09:04

I'm a C# web/software developer and a massive JetBrains enthusiast. I couldn't with without Rider, WebStorm, DataGrip and TeamCity.

What's in your toolkit that you couldn't work without?

MatteRB26 · 22 Aug 2021 at 20:01

I honestly couldn't go back to using VS after Rider I occasionally use VS Code for the extremely light stuff, but it needed so many extensions to be half as good, I gave up trying.

One guy at work uses nothing but VS Code, VIM and Terminal...

peterwalkley said:
Jetbrains fanboi here too but on the java side, so IntelliJ. After that, definitely docker ! So much more convenient than installing stuff locally, faffing with VM's etc.

I need to look at Docker again!

MatteRB26 · 22 Aug 2021 at 22:44

ChroniC said:
Stack overflow.

The day Stack Overflow went down for hours a couple years ago was chaos! None of us knew how to do our jobs :cry:

peterwalkley said:
Do it ! I can be dragged into supporting all sort of old systems at short notice when the brown smelly stuff hits the round spinny thing on customer site. At the simplest level, just being able to locally spin up whichever random one of mysql, several flavours of oracle or postgres I need in a docker instance and then kill when done saves all sorts of pain with VM's, incompatible installations, port clashes etc. All it costs is disk space. That was the simple use case that sold it to me - there's lots more once you get into using it.

It works well on windows, so well that I've stopped bothering to look at Unix for my development environment .. and there's nothing stopping me running a real unix env inside a docker container if there's something that can't work on windows, WSL 2 or cygwin !

I'll definitely take another look. We have a micro service architecture at work on Azure and it can be horrible having to manage 4 environments with over 20 APIs each... We took a look before but time and all that. I have a personal project which currently contains 1 web app and 1 web API, but likely a second web app with Identity Server. Something like Docker may help me a lot here.

MatteRB26 · 25 Aug 2021 at 06:21

Tee Hee Johnson said:
I can get by with purely visual studio, actually I can do without when need be.

I couldn't go back to visual studio.. I haven't even touched it for months now

MatteRB26 · 25 Aug 2021 at 09:24

arty said:
A terminal with (neo)vim and git installed is pretty much all I use

You sound just like someone at work! He lives inside terminals, Vim (or VSCode) and uses the Git CLI (well, CLI for anything really)

MatteRB26 · 25 Aug 2021 at 12:56

chroniclard said:
On a whim I tried Jetbrains but struggling to get it to run/debug a MVC web project.

Any particular errors it's giving? I do find the JetBrains suite to be a bit "invest time on setup, save time with use". It can be quite fussy when it comes to things like MSBuild, I found that having VS installed as well as the VS Build Tools totally made Rider freak out and I had to tell it to use the specific version from the VS install.

MatteRB26 · 28 Aug 2021 at 09:05

peterwalkley said:
If we're going down that non technical rabbit hole then Coffee is the number one productivity tool

Coffee is definitely what keeps me going...

MatteRB26 · 30 Aug 2021 at 07:33

Cromulent said:
Another JetBrains fan here although I use Git from the command line. I think another essential tool for me at least is some virtualisation software. I normally use VMWare Workstation Pro but it broke on the Linux distribution I was using so I ended up on VirtualBox.

I'm awful with the git CLI, especially for things like diffs.. The JB suite has such good git integration now, and PRs even support templates now too