I've been paid to utilize 80 different software tools in my 8 yrs as an engineer. I've gone deep on some (Go, Regex, SQL Server) and light on others (jq, Ruby). All of them have been interesting.
I learn two lessons from this:
- Spend time on fundamentals. No matter where I find myself, I'm grateful I read "Software Architecture: The hard parts." I'm less grateful I read that book on C#.
- Evaluate tradeoffs, not familiarity. Most tools do the same kinds of things. You can write the same app in JS and Rust. Pick the tools that fit your needs, not the ones you've used before.
The categories are illustrative vs comprehensive. I would not say HTML is a programming language for instance.
I've provided links to a couple niche tools I've found to be very helpful.
- Runtimes
- Azure Functions
- Lambdas
- EC2 & ECS
- Azure App Service
- Kubernetes
- KEDA
- WordPress
- CI/CD
- Azure Devops
- GitHub Actions
- Jenkins
- Terraform
- Cloudformation
- CDK
- GitHub
- Make
- Taskfile
- IAM
- SSM
- SecretsManager
- Async messaging
- Azure Service Bus
- Azure Event Grid
- SQS
- EventBridge
- RiverQueue
- Temporal
- Reverse proxies / gateways
- Azure API Manager
- Tyk
- NGINX
- API Gateway
- Low-code
- Microsoft PowerAutomate and PowerApps
- Microsoft SharePoint
- Windmill
- Braze
- API Documentation
- Bruno
- Postman
- Httpie
- OpenAPI
- Load testing
- K6
- Vegeta
- Editors
- DataGrip
- VisualStudio
- VisualStudioCode
- Neovim
- Helix
- IDEA
- Cursor
- Copilot
- Languages
- SQL
- KQL
- XML (included because I have some war stories haha)
- PHP
- Regex (included because I think I'm more practiced than ~95% of devs)
- Protobufs (yes I've written these by hand)
- C#
- HTML
- JS
- Angular
- Ruby
- Python
- Rust
- Java
- TypeScript
- Go
- Cucumber
- WPF / .NET Framework / .NET Core
- SOAP (now that was hellish)
- ThreeJS (I was paid to make a procedurally generated 3D galaxy renderer. That was cool)
- Database-like
What tools have you used? I'd love to hear about them.
Photo Credit: The New York Public Library
Top comments (0)