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 as a project to work on with a short description. I used to use Trello for this. Before coming up with CleanRepos, the idea came with a "Repo Deleter" tag.
* Dropbox Paper
Paper 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 but now trying out Valet.
Version Control
Everybody uses Git... no? I used to use Bitbucket when there were no private repositories on GitHub but now, GitHub for everything. Public and private.
Domain names
For a long time I used Maddogdomains for my domain name management and I still have a couple domains there. But now, I have moved to Namecheap and they are my go-to.
Hosting
I don't do much of shared hosting anymore. When I used to, I used QServers and Gigalayer for clients. Moved to Azure because of BizSpark benefits but that's exhausted now. I use Heroku (free) for my quick deployments and then DigitalOcean (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.