My development environment - Sacha

I have used Windows since DOS and Windows 3.1 days in the 90’s to Vista even today, with practically no experience in Linux. Before I joined the development team, I had never, ever used the Mac OS.

Anyway, before I joined the development team, I was working on my Dell Inspiron 1520 running OEM Vista which was the setup for working on Java and PHP web applications as a freelance software developer.

For coding I used the NetBeans IDE for my heavy Java development and JCreator for lighter Java programs, and Notepad++ for PHP, XHTML, JS, CSS, LUA etc. For web servers I used Tomcat and Apache. Tomcat came bundled in Netbeans, and Apache came in XAMPP. Databases used were MySQL (which also came in XAMPP) and Oracle 10g Express Edition. For general office work, I used MS Office. Most of my media work was images for websites or reports or other documents. For this I used Adobe Photoshop.

Like Anil, when I joined the development team, I was given a Dell Latitude D630 laptop with Windows Vista on it, so I migrated my setup to that machine. After a while, around April of this year I think, the dev team gave me a MacBook with OS X 10.5. With a lot of help and advice from Reiza and Christian, I built up a new development setup during the 7-8 months I used the MacBook for my development work. At the end, my environment looked like this:

Since I almost always work with PHP, XHTML, XML, JS, CSS and SQL these days I code using TextMate, which will also support many other formats. I also have NetBeans for Mac, but I dont use it much these days. Web and database servers I use MAMP which, like XAMPP, has Apache and MySQL servers ready to go. For general office work, I use iWork 2008. Open Office and MS Office 2008 are also available for Mac, but so far iWork does everything I need. For image work I have returned to Adobe Photoshop, but I also use Skitch (also, Leopard’s screen shot features are awesome). The development team uses SVN for versioning, so I use Versions for accessing our SVN. Other apps I use are Transmit for S/FTP, Parallels Desktop for running Windows XP (for IE testing, Oracle 10g, etc.) and Safari and Opera.

Earlier this month I replaced my MacBook with a newer machine and I have kept the Mac OS setup described above. Although I hardly use Windows anymore, I still have a copy of Windows XP running in Parallels on my Mac.

Reasons to use inspiring tools and brands

I came across an interesting blog post over at Particle Tree about the effect your tools (ie. development environment) has on your work.

I can attest to this (hence the shameless div) and, seeing as how Anil has a MacBook now, I think its a post worth checking out. It even has a bit from J.J. Abrams explaining why he uses Apple products.

Particle Tree - Reasons to Use Inspiring Tools and Brands

My Dev Environment - Reiza

I have used Macintosh(System 6 to 9, OS X 10.1 to 10.5 Leopard), Windows(98, 2000, XP), Linux Distros(Mandrake, Fedora, Damn Small Linux) as a desktop OS. I prefer the Mac. I am most productice, effective, creative and comfortable on the Mac.

My current setup is a Macbook(late 2006 Core 2 duo 2GHz, 2GB ram, 80GB hard drive) running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. For my dev work I use, TextMate, Text Wrangler, MAMP, Versions, Terminal, Firefox, Safari. I have a number of applescripts and automator workflows to do some ‘zero-thinking’ file management. I also have some minor modifications to the system to gel with my workspace preferences

My Dev Environment - Anil

Since we are talking about our development, I think it is useful to see the tools we use.
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