For those who might be curious: what tools do I use?

My primary tool is a laptop. Specifically a Lenovo ThinkPad T440s with 12GB RAM and a surprisingly useful touchscreen. It’s my trusty workhorse, running Windows 10 and the EPKL edition of the Colemak keyboard layout. My desktop pc runs Ubuntu Linux, but it sees less of me now that I have the laptop.

The application is hosted on DreamHost where I get unlimited use and fabulous service at an unbeatable price. PHP and MySQL are included automatically, which is the main reason why I chose PHP in the first place. (I also toyed with Meteor and similar neat all-in-one platforms, but they all have special hosting needs that I didn’t like.)

The code is hosted on Github, which means that the project is open source and freely available. Github also provides a ticket tracking system and a wiki where I document the development process itself. It’s also where the releases are published.

I use PhpStorm to write the code, and DBeaver to work on my databases. I use Github Desktop to move code to and from the repository, and the phenomenal Beyond Compare to push files to my public web servers. I don’t need any local web server software because it’s integrated in PhpStorm (it cleverly uses the server that is built into PHP itself), and I run the local code against the development database that is hosted on DreamHost.

This is where you would ask me what debugger I use, but to be honest I don’t use one yet. I am going to start using XDebug soon. The same is true about the PHP framework; the prototype was made by hand (branch 0.1.x), and I am getting ready to use CakePHP for the next iteration (branch 0.2.x).