Know your tools
Many options are open to anyone creating a digital product today from PHP to Ruby, Postgres to Mongo or even Vim to Emacs - it pays to know the tools you are using to produce a system.
I'll explain briefly why this is, the benefits you gain and follow up with the go to set and types of tools that I use.
Having a standard set of tools at your disposal saves time at multiple points of a development cycle, when you initially start a new project you don't have to decide what to use because you have a solid default. It's not unusual for projects to start with bleeding edge technology choices that are not well known to the delivery team and although it sounds exciting, there are few things worse in development than having something not work that you do not understand.
Since you know more about familiar tooling, it's already less likely that things will not work as you expect, experience will teach you how to use your tool. Even when something does not work as you expect you will know how to investigate the problem more efficiently.
When do you know a tool? At the point where you stop asking how to do something and understand what to do.
It is a night and day difference to know the tool you're using, it is a straightforward way to produce better software, in less time and most importantly with less stress!
When creating digital products I use a text editor, at it's core software is text based so this one is unavoidable. Vim is the editor I use because it fits well into the other tools I use, you may find this is a deciding factor for you too! The tools, or more accurately tool set that fit well with vim is the bash shell, which is a console used for all sorts of computing tasks - moving files, navigating file systems and executing other commands.. like Vim!
The operating system I choose to use is a flavour of Linux known as Arch Linux, it is sort of a build your own style system that has a hugely helpful and active community around it. If you have any queries, they can usually be resolved through their wiki or in the community forums.
Version control tools are used to keep track of what changes are made to a project, I use git all the time for this purpose even for keeping a collection of notes. Learning how to use a version control tool such as git is really worth learning, it will save you time and give you the a higher confidence to make changes to your systems without breaking them.
I think this is a rule that can benefit you beyond programming but certainly makes developing products easier. Choose your own set and let me know how you get on.
