I've been working on my solo web start up full-time for about 2 months now, and so this post is about the software, programming platforms/frameworks, operating systems, websites, and apps that I use to stay fast and productive.

First, let me quickly bullet-point my setup:

Local Development:

  • Late 2009 MacBook Pro w/ 8Gigs of RAM
  • Railo, with built-in web server
  • Eclipse w/ CFEclipse, Subclipse, & MXUnit plugins
  • MySQL Community 5.1.51

Cloud Server (Rackspace):

  • CentOS 5.4
  • Railo 3.2
  • Apache 2.2
  • MySQL Community 5.1.51

Top tools list:

  1. Railo - similar to Adobe ColdFusion, but free and open-source, Railo (I'm using the free 3.2 beta version on my local development environment, which is compatible with Adobe ColdFusion 9.01). It's been great! Even though I've been working professionally with only the Adobe version of CF for 10 years, jumping to Railo was fairly painless, once I learned how to install it properly, etc.
  2. Gmail w/ Google Apps - I set up refynr.com mail for GMail and Google apps cuz it's free and very easy to do. I created an info@ address and do all my communication and responding to feedback from there. I also use Google Docs and Spreadsheets for keeping track of competition, Refynr features, ideas, etc. This is a no-brainer.
  3. Rackspace CloudServers: cost me all of $43 dollars last month, which included [1] bandwidth for over 70 Refynr Alpha testers (which does a lot of pulling from the Twitter & Facebook APIs), [2] full snapshot image backups of the server, [3] support via email or Live Chat, and [4] engineers that monitored and automatically rebooted my server when it went down mysteriously this past weekend. I'm happy; however, Amazon recently announced free pricing for lower-end cloud servers, and I'm keeping my eye on that...
  4. HooteSuite - read and post with multiple accounts. I manage 2 Twitter Accounts, Facebook, and LinkedIn from it. I prefer it over TweetDeck so that I can log in from any computer any time without worrying about installing/updating. Also, the analytics for my accounts and Google Analytics for my websites are nice.
  5. CFEclipse - it has great built-in support for Railo, and it's what I've already used for the past 5/6 years, so I found no need to try anything else right now.
  6. MyVersionControl.com - free/cheap Subversion hosting, with more features than I need. I just need the SVN repo space (hosted and secure), and use the Subclipse Eclipse plugin with CFEclipse. Simple. Done.
  7. MySQL - It's free and I already have a few years of experience with it. I did some preliminary investigation into the NoSQL options like MongoDB and CouchDB, but I don't need massive scalability (yet), so am sticking with what I know for now so that I don't get stuck to often. I'd rather just get er done at the moment.
  8. CentOS 5.4 - pretty much an exact replica of RedHat 5.4, so there's lot's of online documentation and help. Plus, it came as an inexpensive option with Rackspace. :)
  9. Sequel Pro - easy-to-use, free, and beautiful MySQL client for Mac. It does what I need 99% of the time, but sometimes I need to use MySQLWorkbench (which I found buggy and cumbersome for everyday use) for stuff like updating certain types of indexes or constraints.
  10. Posterous - this blog runs on Posterous in case you didn't notice. It's great if I need to do a quick post from email, but I like it more for posting via web, adding quick slide shows, and being able to auto-post to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and FriendFeed. I get way more hits on my blog via Posterous than previous platforms I used. This is partially due to making sure it's in RSS aggregators like http://www.coldfusionbloggers.org/ and http://feeds.adobe.com/index.cfm?query=byCategory&categoryId=1&catego...
  11. CyberDuck - their website says it all - "Open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files, Google Docs & Amazon S3 Browser for Mac & Windows." (and FREE!)
  12. Seashore - Photoshop cost money, and GIMP is too complicated for me. I wanted something simple for common tasks. On Windows, that was Paint.NET. On Mac, it's Seashore! (note: I clearly need some better graphics skillz)
  13. jQuery Mobile (Alpha) - it makes the site look good on most mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, etc.), but also looks good on Firefox and Safari. Now, I'll just need to make Refynr.com look decent on IE 8+ and work out the kinks in Chrome. That's pretty good cross-browser/cross-platform compatibility with relatively little effort! And since it's in Alpha, it will only getting better in the next few months... Here's my post about implementing jQuery Mobile on Refynr.com.
  14. CFML Open Source code - First, I decided to not use a ColdFusion Framework (even though ColdBox, CFWheels, and FW/1 were VERY tempting) because I wanted to write the core of Refynr.com from scratch and to make damn sure there's no performance issues when/if I need to scale Refynr.com. In my professional career, I have never built anything very big from scratch; I have always worked on legacy ColdFusion code. Here's the open-source ColdFusion code I've used so far:

Honorable mentions (hope to use in the future) - LogBox, Rackspace CloudFiles, MemCached, MongoDB or CouchDB (?), VirtualBox, Parallels, ManyMoon, Chargify, Selenium, and IETester. And I am testing http://www.feedbackify.com/ for getting feedback off of Refynr.com, but may try http://GetSatisfaction.com at some point, too.

Comment on what tools you use for your startup...