Ask HN: What 5 software tools do you use most for work?

28 points by cagrimmett ↗ HN
What 5 software tools do you use most for work and what is your job? Another way of asking this: What software tools would someone need to learn if they had your job?

41 comments

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Firefox, M$ Office (:/), XenCenter, RoyalTS (all on Windows), and misc. Linuxy stuff..

I'm the IT Guy for a small non-profit research and development company in the higher education sector.

Firefox is used for Spiceworks, various web-based management consoles for our storage devices (and webmin on Linux VMs), and general web stuff. M$ Office is mostly just Outlook and Excel. XenCenter to manage our XenServer infrastructure, and RoyalTS is for RDC-ing to various servers and workstations. Most Linux admin is done via webmin, or shell.

Emacs, Eclipse, Lein, Maven, Node. Two additional ones are in my kit box by default, for different reasons, Java and MS Office. Java is required for Lein, Eclipse, and Maven, and occasional Java components. Node is needed for tool automation, in my case. Emacs is used for general editing needs, and Clojure coding. MS Office is needed because any delivery which does not include documentation doesn't count, and many I work with require documentation in MS Office form.
Emacs, gcc, Android Studio, Putty, and, um, Outlook.
Software team lead / manager. Aside from the self-evident non-role-specific stuff (browser, email, slack):

1) Jira 2) [Text editor of choice] 3) Mac/Unix command line 4) Git 5) [To-do manager of choice]

Data Scientist:

SQL Developer, SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Enterprise Miner, Excel, Jira

We are a "SAS shop", therefore SAS is a must. Knowing other SAS products helps to recognize when a statement like "it is not possible" in reality means "I am not in the mood for working".

[1] PhpStorm [2] adminer [3] Gdocs [4] Putty [5] Dropbox
Full stack freelance engineer:

Visual Studio Code, iTerm, Trello, Google Chrome, and Skype :(

Marketing web developer. Do web applications count?

Atom, git, PHP, Databricks, Google Docs

Research engineer

Every single working day for the past 3 or 4 years vim, terminal, C++, Chrome, and just recently CUDA.

Game producer:

Unity, Sourcetree, Trello, Sketch.app, Apple Notes

vim, tmux, bash, perl, make
Marketing consultant:

Facebook ads

Google ads

Microsoft excel

Google analytics/analytics of choice

Mailchimp/Email automation of choice

Zapier

Fullstack engineer

IntelliJ at home(Eclipse at work), Sublime, Office Suite, Sequel Pro, Chrome Dev Tools

Hourly Programmer: * VS Code * TypeScript * _technically_ open source orchestration platform * Vivaldi * Sketch.app
Freelance Data Analyst/Data Engineering/Data Science...

R, Python, Jupyter, Tableau, MySQL Workbench

Infrastructure engineer: iTerm, Sublime Text, 1Password, Slack, Google Chrome.
Software Engineer: iTerm, TextMate, Enpass, Ruby, Git
Terminal (this is a requirement if you want to do any software related job other than .NET I guess), some sort of a text editor with code code highlighting (Sublime), internet browser (reading documentation is a big part of my job), email client (reading & replying to work emails), version control (git).

Those are basics but there are additional tools which you'll probably need to use daily as well (JIRA, Slack or their equivalents, for example).

C# Software Developer: Visual Studio, VS Code, SQL Server, web browser, slack

  1. Gnome Terminal
  2. Neovim
  3. Google Chrome
  4. Pymodoro (https://github.com/dattanchu/pymodoro)
  5. Git
Product Designer/Developer

Sketch, Visual Studio Code, iTerm, Chrome Dev Tools, InVision

SW Developer, Growth Hacker, Founder

Heres the list:-

1. Operating system ( mostly Linux )

2. Desktop ( mostly gnome )

3. Keyboard/mouse/LCD .... drivers .. ( can't work without them, eh! )

4. Browser ( mostly firefox )

5. Google ( its a SW tool alright! )

  1. Cygwin (Babun)
  2. Sublime Text
  3. Slack
  4. Chrome
  5. Mercurial
Linux Haskell (stack)

emacs (magit, intero)