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Tools of Trade

·2 mins
Coding

I use 13-inch MacBook Pro for personal projects and 15-inch for work. My personal MBP would be the last traditional laptop, hopefully. Since most of my work can easily be done on Linux VPS. I have been using a 10.5-inch iPad Pro with Blink shell for most of my side projects. I like the form factor of iPad Pro and I am getting better at Linux administration. Now I am also setting up Docker images so I can bring up new images as needed.

Though I might still need a personal computer mostly for photos and videos but I might as well buy a desktop next time. I can build a powerful video editing station for a fraction, half or less, of what a decent MacBook Pro would cost.

MacOS Tools
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Brew.sh
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This makes installing various software dev tools super easy.

VS Code
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I was a big fan of Sublime Text and PHPstorm but VS Code finally won me over. PHPStorm is still better for PHP work but VS Code is lighter and faster to open, so I end up opening it more often than PHPStorm.

Docker
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I am getting into DevOps and spinning up new VPSs as needed, Docker is pretty much the default choice for this.

iaWriter
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This is my favorite writing software. I am using this for writing and pretty much all my blog posts.

iOS Tools
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Blink Shell#

This is the best terminal software I have used. It is free and Open Source too. This is all you need to use iPad for development of most web apps and machine learning.

iaWriter
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iOS version on iPad Pro is perfect. A lot of my blog posts are written in Starbucks on iPad.

WorkingCopy
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It is a git client. In theory, you don’t need it when you have shell access to a Linux machine. But vim is great for writing code but not so much when writing blogs.

So I use WorkingCopy to clone my blog on iPad, add new posts with iaWriter, and then again use WorkingCopy to commit and push my posts. I use Netlify for hosting this blog, so as soon as I push new posts, Netlify will publish it here.

Linux Tools
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I have been using Ubuntu as my main flavor of Linux. The list of tools that I use on Linux is long but here are some:

  • Nginx
  • PHP
  • Python
  • Conda
  • Nodejs
  • npm
  • git
  • composer
  • MariaDB
  • vim

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