I rarely blog on other people’s content, but I can’t agree more strongly with this list of essential tools for software engineering:
There are an endless pile of tools engineers are fond of using in their development process, but there are only four that they really need:
- Editor
- Compiler
- Version control
- Bug tracking
The first two tools are for the individual, and the second two are team tools, at least in most cases. Which tools are used, and how well they work, depends on many factors; in a professional environment, it’s largely a corporate culture issue.
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Next in line I would consider “environment/settings/examples”. I keep a customized set of kshrc, zshrc, gvimrc, inputrc, and a bin directory that I migrate to most systems I work on. Then I make sure I have an ansi complient term-emu and decent shell. Term colors, readlib settings, aliases, vim colors/config/macros, etc. And in bin directory, a bunch of common templates that I use to throw together scripts or start new projects — add sockets interface, getopt, readline, lex/yacc template, etc. Sure, every time you need one of these in a project you can google for examples, but I’ve slowly created an archive that works well for me.