Uses

Saturday 14th December 2024

As of 2024, here is my current desk setup.

Hardware

PHPStorm (coupled with plugins for Tailwind CSS, Laravel, Statamic & Vue.js) as my IDE and dive into VS Code for "throwaway" tasks
Chrome as my development browser
Safari for general browsing
Sequel Ace for local MySQL databases
TablePlus for everything else
Raycast for a bunch of productivity wins
Droplr for screenshots and things
Tower for a nicer Git experience, particularly merge conflicts (although I do dive into the command line regularly)
Homebrew for installing dev packages and any other apps from the command line
Laravel Herd for managing local projects
1Password for managing passwords

In no particular order, here are some of the tools in my toolbox:

Laravel: the world's most popular PHP framework with a vibrant community and ecosystem of associated tools. I've yet to have a project it can't handle.
Statamic CMS: the world's best flat-file CMS that comes as a package for Laravel; great for building the marketing site of a project when needed.
Craft CMS.
Tailwind CSS: the best way for a team in 2022 to define styles for a web (and React Native) project. Has excellent documentation.
Vue.js: I originally got into Vue via Laravel and haven't looked back. Shares many similarities with React but is (IMHO) better suited for mixing traditional server rendered views with the JavaScript layer.
React - it's the most popular JavaScript library on the planet. I do prefer Vue.js but React has a much more evolved ecosystem because of the backing it has from Facebook.
Alpine.js: for when I need only a spattering of JavaScript.

Laravel Forge for server provisioning & deployment
Digital Ocean and AWS connected to Forge to actual run the servers
Laravel Vapor for serverless Laravel projects
Postmark for 📧 deliverability
Cloudflare to help with site performance across the 🌍 and also now domain name registration
Algolia for when I need a world-class search experience