Time again for my ‘Best of’ post from mixed categories. Some of these might have slipped through in early 2019, but to get the list a bit longer I count them as 2018.
Software
Heroku (Hosting platform) - Heroku has become well known among developers independently of preferred coding language. Why? Because dev ops tasks are still very time-consuming, difficult, expensive and very often related to stress. Everyone who says something else is lying. It’s a bit funny that Heroku is on the ‘Best-of’ list this year since I had the gem ‘Capistrano’ listed last year. Heroku is like “Capistrano” as a service. It’s an environment managing system, at an even higher level than Capistrano, that makes it easier than ever to deploy and maintain apps into different staging environments. Most noticeable pros are the custom Heroku command line, the ‘add service’ options (Third party add-ons) and the dashboard. The biggest con is however often mentioned around the web, and it’s related to Heroku’s pricing. If you are running something serious, it gets very expensive. The reason why it get’s so expensive, is that they do not offer any subscription options for Dynos between 50$ and 250$ (First option where RAM is exceeding 1GB). Apart from this, the product as a service feels extremly well crafted, and I will continue to use it for a long time.
Forest (Productivity app) - Forest is a small simple productivity app. I use it to track my ‘Power sessions’ that is 45 min of uninterrupted deep work.
Quake Champions (First person shooter) - The master branch is back, this time with an ‘arena like’ shooter, all about multiplayer. Even though the game is hard, and lots of great players online, I’ve slaughtered thousands already. The fragfest will continue into 2019 for sure!
Basecamp (Project management tool) - We’re back on BC and it feels just right. No comment needed, this is currently the best project/business/team management tool on the market. As Heroku, it’s expensive if you are a small team (Fixed pricing 99usd/month), but if you measure it against what you get done, it’s still cheap. I say this having experienced Jira, Asana, Slack, Git, Trello and a few others for project management.
Mailcatcher (Rails gem/service) - This is a small service I use during development that spawns a “fake” inbox on localhost to receive all emails coming for apps running in development locally. With this tool, you do not have to clutter your real email inbox with lots of unfinished emails from your apps.
Books
- The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
- Delivering Happiness: A path to Profits, Passion… - Tony Hsieh
- Small Fry - Lisa Brennan Jobs
- It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work