I don’t make changes to my development setup very often, but this year was very important in terms of massive changes that included both hardware and software changes.
The first major change this year was replacing my main development laptop with the new. For the past 10 years, I only use Lenovo laptops, and since 2015, I was using Lenovo Yoga Pro 2 laptop. But, that laptop had few issues, including very bad keyboard (Lenovo laptops are known for great keyboards, but early Yoga models, were not as good).
The Hardware
So, in February this year, I replaced Yoga with L480 powered by Intel Core i5 8520u CPU. Since then I made few upgrades, and now this laptop has 16GB DDR4 RAM and 2 NVMe drives with total of 512GB space.
I recently replaced my phone, and now I am using Samsung Galaxy A50, with 128GB drive, 4GB RAM, triple camera setup and AMOLED display.
The Software
The most important software-related change I made this year, is ditching NetBeans for JetBrains PHPStorm. I have written about that already, so check out the blog post here. I use PHPStorm for PHP, JavaScript, CSS and it also covers various other tasks like compiling SCSS to CSS, minification of files other things that you would usually have a build environment setup.
Other important programs I use include two programs from CloudBerry (or MSP360 as they are called now): Cloud Explorer and Desktop Backup. Since I use Amazon AWS for various things, management can be an issue via AWS native web interface, and I prefer the way Cloud Explorer interacts with Amazon S3 and CloudFront. And, Desktop Backup is simply an amazing tool for making backups locally or remotely to various cloud-based storage.
For design purposes, images related work, I use two great programs by Serif: Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer. They are an amazing alternative to Adobe programs, and I use them for over a year now, and I never wished to have Photoshop or Illustrator back.
Another new app I am using for the last 6 months Notion. It is a great app for scheduling, organization of time, taking notes. I will write more about it soon. As for browsers, Chrome is still my main development browser, but I have Firefox, Vivaldi, Edge and Opera on hand for testing.
The Servers
For all local development, I use two different environments. One is XAMPP in two different versions, running different PHP versions, and I also use Local by Flywheel a lot this year, with at least 80% of work done on the environments run by Local.
So, that’s it for now. Let me know if you want to know more about specific applications, and let me know if you use any of these, and what alternatives you can suggest for me to try out.