Tools I use at work

History / Edit / PDF / EPUB / BIB /
Created: March 11, 2020 / Updated: February 6, 2021 / Status: finished / 3 min read (~568 words)

What tools do I use daily at work?

  • Notion.so I use Notion.so to track my day to day tasks and their progress. I also use it to write down any idea I have during the day that I would like to explore at some point in the future. I've described my task management system in more details.
  • JIRA I work in a corporate environment, which means that we need to track tasks and assignments through a shared system. That system is JIRA. I don't particularly like JIRA after having used redmine for 5+ years and liking it. JIRA is slow, complex and cumbersome, which makes me avoid it at all costs. It's a shame, given that task management is one of the most important things in a software development business.
  • Visual Studio Code I use VS Code to take notes throughout the day as well as to edit files from time to time.
  • PyCharm My current job is mostly about writing python code, and PyCharm is the best IDE to do that. I use it to implement new functionality, write tests and debug issues. It is highly customizable which makes using it a joy. I also make use of the run/debug configurations regularly to test a variety of cases over the lifetime of the projects I work on. Finally, because I've used PHPStorm in the past, transitioning from PHPStorm to PyCharm was easy and painless.
  • iTerm2 I spend a good part of my day interacting with various CLIs. I use a Mac and the terminal simply doesn't cut it for me and I prefer interacting with GUI tabs over having a tmux.
  • Chrome Anyone doing software development spends a large portion of their time online looking for solutions to their problems/questions. I use Chrome mostly to use the Google suite, to use Jira/Confluence or to look at reports generated by the tool I work on.
  • Google suite (Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides) I work in a collaborative environment which means writing and reading documents to share ideas, data, requirements and notes with others.
  • Slack Working with others means communicating with others. While it's possible to talk directly to my teammates, sometimes it is more respectful to simply send them an instant message asking them to come to see you when they are available. Slack also allows communication with people in other teams, as well as people that are in separate offices.
  • GitHub We use git exclusively at work as a way to do version control. We use GitHub as our central location to share our repository, as well as to do code reviews.
  • Drone Whenever I push code to GitHub, Drone makes sure that a variety of tasks are executed to ensure code quality: linting, code formatting, type checking, unit/function/integration tests and documentation building. Having a build system reduces the time between faulty code is pushed to GitHub and the code being fixed.