Ask Pandera Labs #1: Wrenches & Notepads
Q: Everyone in tech has their own methods, approaches, workflows, processes, and preferred software. What’s one tool without which you absolutely cannot do your job?
Joel, engineering: The Unix command line. Every day I use and combine a dozen random utilities to solve different problems. When I lose access to my particular box of Unix tooling, my productivity drops by probably half or more.
Rebecca, design: Sketch, because it has better integrations and plugins, and because it syncs up with InVision and Zeplin, which makes everything so much easier. I still use Photoshop (for editing photography) and Illustrator (for vector objects and illustrations) but when it comes to wires and mocks, Sketch has been the best so far. The whole design team can collaborate, even as we all focus on different areas. Teamwork makes the dream work.
Bry, engineering: Emacs. I don’t like leaving the terminal.
Adam, engineering: Postico, primarily for its Mac gestures to switch between tables and schemas.
Tom, product: Atom for note-taking in markdown. It’s a great lightweight, extensible app. Writing in markdown is quick and intuitive, plus rending the markdown to share with others can easily be done in a split-screen view.
Dean, engineering: I don’t personally care about software tools too much (give me a notepad.exe and that’ll do) but I do care about good engineering teammates and culture. With good teammates the sense of support, accountability, and the quality of work skyrockets. Without a solid team of experts to work with — people who care about the quality of their work — everything devolves into a mess, and working becomes unhappy and stressful.
Mike, data: I spend most of my time in an SQL client, and have learned to use whatever the client has available. Sometimes cost is an issue. There are very good clients, IDEs, and management toolsets that can be used with any DBMS. TOAD is a popular product that only costs about $145 a year. We also use DataGrip, which is made by JetBrains (the same company that makes IntelliJ) and is a little cheaper than TOAD. I often just use the database-specific tool to save money. Currently I am using a free version of pgAmin for postgres. I will not spend the money on a tool if a free one gets the job done.
Butch, engineering: The Advanced Rest Client Chrome extension. I am a simple person of simple tastes and I appreciate the ability to simply input the API request I want to test without having to set variables, environments, and so on. While the convenience of Postman is great if it’s set up for my project, most of the time I just want to do a quick test on an endpoint, and the simplicity of ARC is great for me.
Mallory, design: Adobe Illustrator for sure. Whenever I get a request to create some sort of graphic, whether it’s for a blog post header image, somebody’s presentation that needs spicing up, or just slapping together my own doodles, Illustrator is the first thing I open. It’s got probably a million different tools that are spectacular for building really complex or perfectly simple illustrations, icons, anything! And now that I’ve mastered a bunch of hotkeys, I can fly through the program with stupendous speed and efficiency.
Ed, engineering: Open in my browser right now: email, Github, Github, Github, NPM, Redux docs, Medium blog posts, Github, Github, Google Drive, Github, npm, Stack Overflow, 2ality, Google Forms, a recipe for nog, and more Github — throughout a day I open up something like 100 different Chrome browser tabs. Normally I’m so busy opening Chrome browser tabs that I just don’t have time to close them, and with each taking up a tiny bit of memory and CPU my machine can quickly grind to a halt. Enter The Great Suspender: if I haven’t looked at a tab for five minutes, it suspends the tab so it’s not using any system resources and keeps my machine purring while I continue opening up other tabs.
Jeff, product: OneNote, although a close runner-up is Trello: OneNote for those excellent hotkeys to add to-do markers, question indicators, et cetera (and I used to love its integration with Outlook when I used Windows machines); Trello I like for being so lightweight. Literally no setup required, and its labels make it easy to distinguish tasks for different projects on the same board. Aside from that? An empty email inbox.
Dom, engineering: I feel accomplished after getting through a big git merge and all conflicts have been resolved. Merging in git can be laborious, and as a result there are a ton of git diff and git merge tools out there to help viewing and accepting changes. My favorite is not a standalone tool, but built into JetBrains products such as IntelliJ, WebStorm, and Android Studio. It displays three-way merges in a nice three panel display, where the middle panel gets full code editing support and the two surrounding panels allow you to pull in changes from local or remote. I use Atom instead of IntelliJ as my primary IDE now, but I’ve setup my .gitconfig to launch the IntelliJ CE diff and merge tool whenever I need that functionality.
g, engineering: Headphones. And the internet. Is that a tool?
At Pandera Labs, we’re always exploring new ways to build products and iterate on our engineering processes, and we value sharing our findings with the broader community as our company and our technology evolve together. To reach out directly about the topic of this article or to discuss our offerings, visit us at panderalabs.com.
