Here are some of my favourite tools I make use of in my tech work. Some of these do have more posts about their usage.

Text Editor

Visual Studio Code: an editor that manages to be extremely powerful with a lot of features and extension support even while being relatively lightweight. See blog posts tagged as Visual Studio Code.

Terminals

Windows Terminal: a pleasant terminal in Windows that incorporates all your shells in one app. This is now default on Windows 11 but requires downloading it separately on Windows 10.

PuTTy: a great option to save multiple SSH connections to servers, with a lot of configuration settings to navigate different requirements. If you're connecting to the same set of websites regularly, this can save you some time and some typos.

Code Repositories

Git with GitLab or GitHub: for the most part I use GitLab professionally and GitHub personally. GitLab gives a bit more project management tools out of the box, but they're both great. See posts tagged as Git, GitLab, and GitHub.

Accessibility Testing

WAVE: testing tools including a browser extension that can help highlight accessibility issues while you browse the site.

Pa11y: testing tools that are especially great from a command line, including being able to incorporate them into CI/CD pipeline tests.

Playwright with Axe: Playwright is a general testing tool that can simulate browser activity. Axe-core provides accessibility test results. Putting them together, you can carry out actions - as simple as loading a page or more complicated such as expanding menus - and then run accessibility tests. These can be run well within CI/CD automated tests as well as locally with great VS Code support.

See posts tagged as accessibility.

Database Management

MySQL Workbench: a heavy-duty database tool that lets you see the database in convenient table views, edit inline, and run other commands. See my blog post about MySQL Workbench.

MySQL Extension in Visual Studio Code: extension to access MySQL servers, including viewing in an easy-to-read table format and running queries.