Mike Gunderloy posted his annual roundup of development tools, prompting Ruby Inside’s Peter Cooper to issue a call for field reports from the rest of the Rubyist operatives out there. Here’s my contribution to this reasonable meme.

Hardware

13″ 4GB Macbook Pro, circa Oct 2009 – running Snow Leopard and Windows 7, this aluminum savior is the anointed godhead of my development world.

17″ SAGER NP9262 (Clevo D901C) – the Apollo to the Macbook’s Adonis, this serves as my “power incarnate” machine. It wears Windows 7 handsomely, and will happily execute any resource intensive tasks I send to its gallows.

Dell 24″ Widescreen Monitor – Has saved more alt/tab keys than I care to calculate.

Mobile Edge Alienware Deluxe Backpack – it took a lot of restraint to put down my loathing for the garish-boutique-markup-vendor of a company and pick up their product, but Alienware carries one of the nicest laptop bags for bending spacetime to accommodate my 17″ Sager, complete with a bivouac’s worth of pouches and harnesses.

Dell XPS M170 – a venerable hero of bygone days, XPS remains in active service running Windows XP SP3 to surprisingly good effect. Trustworthy and redoubtable, measured as the balance of power and portability, and bearing a warranty that allows me to summon field medics!

24″ iMac – Media and not much else. Media and testing.

Backups

External 1TB Seagate drives – Handles everything from automated backups to disc images to source control. Almost as reassuring as RAID, with a bit more administrative overhead.

Various cloud-hosted SVN/Git repositories – Source control repositories are in my opinion the most natural location to “backup” and “restore” from, be it locally or in magical clouds dappled with unicorn glitter.

Synch between machines – An informal but nonetheless practical backup that comes as a consequence of frequently switching computers.

Software

Firefox – I don’t think I use as many FF plugins as most developers, but those I do I find to be indispensible.

• FireBug – Especially with all the Javascript development I’ve been doing in the last year, FireBug continues to reaffirm itself as one of the most important tools at a web developer’s disposal, and has attained a damn-near-ubiquitous presence in our community.
• Adblock Plus –It turns out that nobody wants to look at ads, no matter how important they are to a stranger’s business model.
• ColorZilla – Pure convenience plugin for ganking color schemes from attractive pages.
• CSSValidator – First step in CSS bug hunting, conveniently in plugin form.
• PageValidator – Another convenience plugin, helps with developing on FF and testing outwards.
• JSONView – Beautifully formatted JSON output a la the colored, indented XML we’re accustomed to.
• FireFTP – Integrated FTP for convenience, though I usually run FileZilla.
• YSlow – I can guess a site’s YSlow score in my head with reliable accuracy now, but it’s still an effective sanity check.
• Greasemonkey – Testing in the browser is *painful* and Greasemonkey eases this pain.

XCode – Getting better with every release, and the 10.6 build made some huge improvements.

Visual Studio 2008 – I don’t do enough .NET work these days to upgrade to 2010 yet, but VS remains my favorite IDE on account of its richness and excellent debugger. I still open it on a weekly basis for the Javascript debugger alone.

NetBeans – Probably the most used and abused software on my system after the browsers, NetBeans is a like a whole pantheon of gods for platforms I’m working with and has rightfully become my daily place of worship.

TextMate – A solid “DE”, it’s proven itself quite serviceable for Rails development with a earnest, supportive community striving to ensure, say, that we never run out of attractive color coded themes.

Mac Terminal– CLI power is liberating and arcane and productive like six days of God!

Photoshop CS4 – as only an amateur digital artist, I gravitate to Photoshop not for its power but because of the wealth of instructional information available. I started using Photoshop 4 in high school and the mostly awful Adobe has kept me as an impressionable customer since then.

Paint.NET/GIMP – Perfectly serviceable alternatives to Photoshop that I’m starting to come around to more and more. My GFX program of choice now depends on whatever computer I happen to be using.

MS Excel – The best software ever published by Microsoft and consummate spreadsheet tool. I use it daily in one sundry capacity or another.

Cygwin – For terminal goodness on Windows.

HeidiSQL – Stable, quick, lightweight database interface that just works and never hangs.

FileZilla – I’ve been using this for longer than I can remember for all my FTP transferring needs. If it’s not the best of breed, I wouldn’t know because I’ve never had a complaint that pushed me toward its rivals.

Git/msysGit – The DVCS of the gods; and mortals too, since this is probably one of the biggest software influences on how I work that I’ve adopted in the last few years.

SVN/Tortoise – And yet I also maintain a lot of older and perfectly operable Subversion repos, for which Tortoise is winning interface, though I find myself using SVN more for document management these days than code versioning.

TiddlyWiki – A potent cocktail of brain map, getting things done, project management, scratch paper, and other assorted miscellany that I’ve tried everything from MS Notes to .txt files to manage. TiddlyWiki is my ideal implementation of this bizarre, nebulous workspace.

KeePass – Everyone has a password manager, and KeePass is ever-sagacious gatekeeper to whom I entrust the keys to my world.

Truecrypt – Excellent security, and comforting fixture of my life the more and more I find myself traveling abroad.

PuTTY – For when I must adventure into the frightful lands of Telnet.

Growl – Eternally straddling that line between informative and intrusive.

Jing/Camtasia – For recording demos, screencasts, tutorials, whatever.

Adium/Digsby – Covers 99% of my communication needs.

Skype – And of course, Skype is the other 1%.

Hosting

Dreamhost – A compelling balance between affordability and “unterrible” support, even if the servers are habitually slow. Serves this blog and some other middle-ground needs of mine.

1and1 – Still hosting here due the uncompromising mediocrity of a company whose servers have never been worse or better than “okay”.

Pair.com – Most responsive technical support I’ve ever received from a hosting company.

Heroku – I’ve taken to pushing all new Rails applications I’m building over to heroku, both professional and personal. So far I’ve been very, very, very happy with everything from one-click deployments to their knowledgeable staff.