Content Notice!

This post is really old, and no longer reflect my skill level, views or opinions, it is made available here for archival purposes (it was originally on my old WordPress blog).

Keep that in mind when you read the contents within.

Updated 2014 Tools I Use In My Workflow

I'ts been quite awhile since I wrote my "Tools i use in my workflow" blog post last year, and since some of the information in that post is outdated today, I thought I'd write a new one of these "what tools do you use?"  type posts.

Text Editor!

First of all, what I believe is the cause for my increased productivity as of late, is that I changed my text editor from Notepad++ to Sublime Text 2,.

It's wonderful package management system and plethora of configurations and keybindings gives me the ability to change anything to what I want it to be.

I also find that it's better to use a darker color scheme when programming, although you can change the notepad++ theme easily, I think it's nice to have this by default in Sublime Text.

It is not a free editor sadly, although the trial version is unlimited and has every feature enabled, the only thing it does is to give you a little Nag-screen every 50th~ish time you save your file.

Frameworks!

I have recently started becoming more of an MVC-addict, and I plan on using this approach in pretty much every project from now on as I find the pattern to be so god damned beautiful and easy to maintain.

The MVC framework I have been playing with is called CodeIgniter and is one of the top dogs along with Zend Framework, Laravel and Phalcon.

I really like how easy and beautiful the code I write becomes when I put it into CodeIgniter, the documentation is fantastic and there is so many tutorials, guides and courses available on the internet that it's hard to get stuck.

I've personally been following JREAM's Course on his website, and found these very easy to follow and has learned a great deal from his course and YouTube videos, other than that there is the TutsPlus courses, they are a little bit outdated now, but it still teaches you the fundamentals of CodeIgniter and the MVC pattern.

Another framework that I've been playing with is called Slim, It is not a MVC framework, but a Microframework that gives you some basic routing capabilities as well as some basic "view rendering", for small applications it's really helpful and saves me a lot of time.

I am currently using it to create a simple custom CMS for a client website, it allows me to be really productive while maintaining code readability.

Local Web Server!

When I wrote my previous post I didn't use a local web server for development, I used a sub domain on my website where I uploaded all my files after I had changed something to test them, this approach in hindsight was a horrible way to develop as it not only wastes time and bandwidth, I would need to have access to the internet to get anything done.

But now I have started to use XAMPP for all my development, I am currently also learning how to administer Apache through the configuration files so I can set up local test domains, setup custom logging and various other things that Apache can do.

What tools do you use to make your life easier?