Ben's Tools!

System Administration

• nmon - Monitor all system resources at once
• ncdu - Disk usage for directories
• htop - Better than top
• Running MySQL on Amazon EC2 with EBS - Simple directions for how to create and mount a filesystem from a block device.
• Ubuntu or Debian!
• Locust - Load testing with Python and a web GUI

Python

• arrow - Better dates and times for Python
• iPython Notebook - Save iPython sessions for later
• ipdb - Step-by-step debugging in Python
• Requests - Simple HTTP requests in Python

Emacs

• Emacs for Mac OS X
• emacs-starter-kit
• Built in Emacs tutorial - Open Emacs, hit Control+h, then t.
• Built in Emacs help - Open Emacs, hit Control+h, then Control+h again.

Shell

• oh-my-zsh - Starter kit for ZSH
• tmux - Better than screen, use backtick (`) as control key instead of Control+b.

MySQL

• MariaDB - Modern fork of MySQL
• Online incremental backups for MySQL - Lots of nice management on top of xtrabackup/innobackupex.

OS X

• Remap Caps Lock to Control!
• ShiftIt - Maximize and manage windows better in OS X
• iTerm - Deals more nicely with tmux than Terminal
• Sequel Pro - Query and manage MySQL from OS X
• More interesting key mapping - I don't use these, but they're interesting
• Beamer - Send movies at full quality from your computer to Apple TV (better quality than AirPlay)

Prototyping/Desgin

• POP - Prototyping on paper
• Sketch - Better than Photoshop for wireframing and design
• Skitch - Quickly annotate and share screenshots
• Google Fonts - Downloadable and web-friendly fonts
• The Noun Project - Free and premium vector icons

GIS

• PostGIS - GIS indexes for Postgres
• GeoDjango - GIS support for Django
• TileMill - Design beautiful custom maps with CSS-like syntax
• MapBox - Customizable maps for web or mobile
• QGIS - General GIS tool
• twofishes - Foursquare's coarse geocoder based on GeoNames data
• GIS data sources
  • OpenStreetMap - Free wiki map of the world, including lots of hyperlocal data
  • Natural Earth - Global country and state/province polygons, also includes other vectors and rasters for the world
  • tz_world - Timezone polygons
  • GeoNames - Free global datasets of points and point-based US ZIP codes
  • Maponics - Best premium provider of neighborhoods and ZIP code polygons
  • TIGER/Line - Official US data about school districts, counties, cities, states, ZIP codes, roads

Things people have told me but I haven't tried yet

• Anonymous Pro coding font - from @turingmachine
• Source Code Pro coding font - from @wadey