These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2011 Fall edition. This post is written by the Referama team, formed by Alejandro Riera and Fernando Sáinz.
This is a matter of personal taste, but there are still a few recommendations that we wanted to share and that we would’ve wanted someone to tell us:
Tools for the Team
Git – absolutely great for Source Control. It’s fast, takes little space, works offline, let’s you branch and merge painlessly and instantaneously, and gives you access to the Amazing World Of Github. As Philip said, Github is awesome, it gives you hope on people’s ability to build great products, and provides you with a nice free mac app. Git may not look so good at first, with his rather unfriendly command interface, but you only need to know the very basics to enjoy it, take a look at these tutorials.
For Project Management, we tried Bugzilla and Trac but ended up with Pivotal Tracker, really nice for agile development, and we have an eye on a new free player Trello. Some times just a nice shared google doc will do, just keep track of where you spend your time on, and have a feasible “next task” always available. This allows you to know your real speed, be selective and avoid deadlocks.
For working remotely, give a try to Google Hangouts with Extras. It gives you cam, docs, simple drawings and screen sharing. Increasing the font size it’s often a good idea.
For mockups, first notebook and pen, then balsamiq, then the rest.
Shared Dropbox Folders – they are great, just don’t use them for source control.
Tools for the back
A quick check on Katelyn’s list:
- Source Control, Github, done
- Real Time Alerts, try something basic like pingdom to know that your site is up, and a tool like Airbrake (rails, iOs, js) to handle the errors more wisely.
- Deployment Scripts: tools like capistrano will let you update your server in seconds and – even more importantly – rollback automatically to a working version when you screw things up. Add some backup routines into the mix for sanity.
- Continuous Integration: just start testing. At first seems like a pain, but just try it. Pick a simple feature and make a small test to see if it works. Soon, you’ll be enjoying the sight of a machine performing hundreds of tests on your app at your command. We know you’ll like it.
Tools for the front
- Firebug or Chrome developer Tools (check the videos) are lifesavers, but we bet you already use them.
- Give a try to HAML. Some people love it, some hate it, but thanks to it our html is twice shorter and four times more readable. Takes 1 minute to learn, make up your own mind.
- CSS: there are so many terrible things to say… we want to make a tips&tricks crash course in Carabanchel this month, for those who already know it well, it’s worth checking out compass and html5-boilerplate to see a summary of snippets and good practices, even if you don’t plan to use these frameworks.
Learn and Ask
- Find blogs, podcasts and screencasts for your languages of choice. The last ones are just incredible to learn hand by hand from experts (for rails & js, check out railscasts and peepcode)
- Find out about other projects stacks (webpulp.tv , highscalability) and directories of libraries with ratings (ruby-toolbox is amazing), join a google group of programmers and ask them about their choices and experience after you’ve done your research.
- Get to know your community and check that your libraries are well supported. Go to github if you are lucky and check the last update time, the number of watcher and forks, the opened issues.
Before finishing this post, just three more quick tips: for backend stuff stackoverflow is great, but sometimes you may get better results adding serverfault to the google search. For osX, iterm2 is awesome. And do yourself a favor and use a mail service such as Amazon SES, spending days trying to fight spam folders it’s not worth it.
