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The Top 10 Productivity Booster Techs for Programmers

lukaseder

This is the list we’ve all been waiting for. The top 10 productivity booster techs for programmers that – once you’ve started using them – you can never do without them any longer.

Here it is:

1. Git

Before, there were various version control systems. Better ones, worse ones. But somehow they all felt wrong in one way or another.

Came along Git (and GitHub, EGit). Once you’re using this miraculous tool, it’s hard to imagine that you’ll ever meet a better VCS again.

You’ve never used Git? Get started with this guide.

2. Stack Overflow

No kidding. Have you ever googled for anything tech-related back in 2005? Or altavista’d something back in 2000? Or went to FidoNet in search for answers in 1995? It was horrible. The top results always consisted in boring forum discussions with lots of un-experts and script kiddies claiming wrong things.

These forums still exist, but they don’t turn up on page 1 of Google search results.

Today, any time you search for something, you’ll have 2-3 hits per top 10 from Stack Overflow. And chances are, you’ll look no further because those answers are 80% wonderful! That’s partially because of Stack Overflow’s cunning reputation system, but also partially because of Stack Overflow’s even more cunning SEO rewarding system. (I already got 98 announcer, 19 booster, and 5 publicist badges. Yay).

While Stack Overflow allows its more active user to pursue their vanity (see above ;-) ), all the other users without any accounts will continue to flock in, finding perfect answers and clicking on very relevant ads.

Thumbs up for Stack Overflow and their awesome business model.

3. Office 365

We’re a small startup. Keeping costs low is of the essence. With Office 365, we only pay around $120 per user for a full-fledged Office 2013 suite, integrated with Microsoft Onedrive, Sharepoint, Exchange, Access, and much more.

In other words, we get enterprise-quality office software for the price of what students used to pay, before.

And do note, Office 2013 is better than any other Microsoft (or Libre) Office suite before. While not a 100% Programmer thing, it’s still an awesome tool chain for a very competitive price.

4. IntelliJ

While Eclipse is great (and free), IntelliJ IDEA, and also phpStorm for those unfortunate enough to write PHP are just subtly better in almost every aspect of an IDE. You can try their free community edition any time, but beware, you probably won’t switch back. And then you probably won’t be able to evade the Ultimate edition for long ;-)

PHPStorm is the only way to survive working with PHP

5. PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL claims to be the world’s most advanced Open Source database, and we think it’s also one of the most elegant, easy, standards-compliant databases. It is really the one database that makes working with SQL fun.

We believe that within a couple of years, there’s a real chance of PostgreSQL not only beating commercial databases in terms of syntax but also in terms of performance.

Any time you need a data storage system with a slight preference for SQL-based ones, just make PostgreSQL your default choice. You won’t be missing any feature in that database.

Let’s hear it for PostgreSQL.

6. Java

Java is almost 20 years old, but it’s still the #1 or #2 language on the TIOBE index (sharing ranks with C), for very good reasons:

While some languages may seem a bit more modern or sexy or geeky, Java has and will always rule them all in terms of popularity. It is a first choice and with Java 8, things have improved even more.

7. jOOQ

Now, learning this from the jOOQ blog is really unexpected and a shocker, but we think that jOOQ fits right into this programmer’s must-have top-10 tool chain. Most jOOQ users out there have never returned back to pre-jOOQ tools, as they’ve found writing SQL in Java as simple as never before.

Given that we’ve had Java and PostgreSQL before, there’s only this one missing piece gluing the two together in the most sophisticated way.

And besides, no one wants to hack around with the JDBC API, these days, do they?

8. Less CSS

When you try Less CSS for the first time, you’ll think that

Why isn’t CSS itself like this!?

And you’re right. It feels just like CSS the way it should have always been. All the things that you have always hated about CSS (repetitiveness, verbosity, complexity) are gone. And if you’re using phpStorm or some other JetBrains product (see above), you don’t even have to worry about compiling it to CSS.

As an old HTML-table lover who doesn’t care too much about HTML5, layout, and all that, using Less CSS makes me wonder if I should finally dare creating more fancy websites!

Never again without Less CSS.

9. jQuery

What Less CSS is for CSS, jQuery is for JavaScript. Heck, so many junior developers on Stack Overflow don’t even realise that jQuery is just a JavaScript library. They think it is the language, because we’ve grown to use it all over the place.

Yes, sometimes, jQuery can be overkill as is indicated by this slightly cynical website: http://vanilla-js.com

But it helps so much abstracting all the DOM manipulation in a very fluent way. If only all libraries were written this way.

Do note that we’ve also published a similar library for Java, in case you’re interested in jQuery-style DOM XML manipulation. Along with Java 8’s new lambda expressions, manipulating the DOM becomes a piece of cake.

10. C8H10N4O2

C8H10N4O2 (more commonly known as Caffeine) is probably the number one productivity booster for programmers.

Some may claim that there’s such a thing like the Ballmer Peak. That might be true, but the Caffeine Peak has been proven times and again.

Have Dilbert’s view on the matter:

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2006-10-19/

More productivity boosters

We’re certainly not the only ones believing that there is such a thing as a programmer-productivity-booster. Enjoy this alternative list by Troy Topnik here for more insight:

http://www.activestate.com/blog/2010/03/top-ten-list-productivity-boosters-programmers

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