Tools I Use

I think the best tool for the job is whichever tool works best for you. I also think that personal computers should be – well, personal. As such, I like to tweak the settings and appearance of my apps to make myself “feel at home” when I sit down to work. Here are some things I use. You may want to give them a try, and if I’m missing one of your favorites feel free to tell me about it!

Last Updated: October 31, 2023

Blog

I’ve recently moved away from WordPress in favor of having a static website. I did this for a variety of reasons. I am able to write my content in markdown and keep it under version control. This markdown is processed and plain HTML is output which improves the security by minimizing the potential attack surface. What did I use to make this happen? I keep my source files in a git repository and use a build pipeline with Jekyll and Ruby to output HTML which is deployed to a web host. In my case, I’m hosting this site with as an Azure Static Web App. Because the output is simply static web content there are many hosting options. Azure offers an integrated build/release pipeline that works well with GitHub and Jekyll. On top of that for my expected traffic and usage, this hosting is nearly free! The images used for blog post headers and cards come from Pablo.

Code Editor

I am fortunate enough to have licensing to Visual Studio through my jobby-job. I like to use this for “heavier” projects such as building out an API with a database. When I want to build out a web application I prefer to use VS Code (Insiders). And, for a quick peek at a file or minor changes I like to use Sublime.

Visual Studio Extensions

• Add New File (64-bit) by by Mads Kristensen
• Color Preview by Mads Kristensen
• File Icons by Mads Kristensen
• Markdown Editor v2 (64-bit) by Mads Kristensen
• Productivity Power Tools 2022 by Microsoft DevLabs
• Reset Tool Windows by Mads Kristensen
• Resharper by Jet Brains
• Visual Studio IntelliCode by Microsoft
• Visual Studio Theme Pack by Microsoft DevLabs

Visual Studio Code Extensions

• Angular Essentials by John Papa
• Bootstrap 4, Font awesome 4, Font Awesome 5 by Ashok Koyi
• C# by Microsoft
• Dev Containers by Microsoft
• GitLens by GitKraken
• Prettier - Code formatter by Prettier
• Spell Right by Bartosz Antosik
• SynthWave ‘84 by Robb Owen

Sublime

• Package Control
• Pretty JSON

Code Assistants

Beyond the intelligent suggestion features of Visual Studio and Resharper, I have done some minimal exploration of both GitHub CoPilot (including experimental features in labs) and the Amazon AWS Toolkit offering (CodeWhisperer, etc). As of yet, I haven’t found a permanent place in my workflow for these tools, but they are advancing at a breakneck pace and this is certainly an area to watch.

Source Control

I have current projects in Subversion and Git. For hosted Git repositories, I have experience with Azure DevOps and GitHub. I have worked with other source control products in the past but am happy to be trending toward Git for everything.

• Working Copy by Anders Borum (Git for iPadOS)

Hardware

My computing daily driver is a 16” MacBook Pro. I use a remote desktop connection to a dedicated Windows workstation for the majority of my Windows-based development and any workflows which are best served by a Windows desktop environment.

I have also developed a workflow which allows me to write and edit blog posts on my iPad. I can then commit to my GitHub repository using Working Copy which will trigger a build and release.