Tom's Toolbelt

toolbelt.md

Very outdated.

Tom's Toolbelt

A highly opinionated list of the things I use to make other things.

I develop on OS X and deploy to Ubuntu. A Macbook Air with a retina display would be a perfect laptop. I use Sublime Text 3 to write almost all my code. Homebrew is my package manager of choice.

Table of Contents

• Deployment
• Terminal
• Python
• JavaScript
• CSS
• Data storage
• Miscellaneous

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Deployment

I deploy my static sites to Github Pages. I deploy my backends to Heroku or Digital Ocean.

Terminal

• Color scheme: Tango Dark
• Shell: zsh
• Prompt: pure
• Text editor: vim is the best text editor because it is everywhere and won't give you carpal tunnel.

Here are my dotfiles.

Python

I use Python for scripting, machine learning/NLP and web development. Useful features/libraries in Python:

• fileinput: read lines from files listed in sys.argv, or from stdin if empty
• Counter and defaultdict: for accumulating things in dictionaries under the same keys
• tempfile: temporary files
• logging: better than just printing everything

I use Python 3 whenever I can. Useful features/libraries in Python 3:

• dictionary comprehensions: {k: v for k, v in stuff}
• built-in virtual environments (pyenv)
• built-in pip
• concurrency à la Node (asyncio)
• built-in enums
• pathlib: high-level path library

IPython is a lot better than the default interpreter. Make sure you enable autoreload.

Web scraping

• Beautiful Soup - pip install beautifulsoup4

Web framework

• Flask - pip install flask

NLP / text processing

• TextBlob - pip install textblob && python -m textblob.download_corpora

JavaScript

Use ES6 (via Babel) if possible. Don't use CoffeeScript. TypeScript is acceptable.

• Node.js - Homebrew: brew install node

LaTeX

• KaTeX - Node: npm install katex, Duo: require('Khan/KaTeX')

Markdown

• Marked - Node: npm install marked, Duo: require('chjj/marked')

Async

I currently use promises to manage async operations. They're a planned part of ES6, but since they're currently unavailable in any stable browser or runtime, I use the Bluebird (Node: npm install bluebird, Duo: require('petkaantonov/bluebird')) library instead. Promises are much better than callbacks, but stream-based async (reactive programming) is probably the future.

Terminal-related

• Chalk - Node: npm install chalk

Web framework

• Express - Node: npm install express

Dates

• Moment.js - Duo: require('moment/moment/');, Node: npm install moment

CSS

Baseline

• Normalize.css - Duo: @import 'necolas/normalize.css';

Icons

• Font Awesome - Duo: @import 'FortAwesome/Font-Awesome';

Preprocessor

• Sass - Ruby: gem install sass

Colors

• Colors - Duo: @import 'mrmrs/colors';

Data storage

SQL database

• PostgreSQL - Homebrew: brew install postgresql

Key-value store

• Redis - Homebrew: brew install redis

Miscellaneous

Bandwidth Shaping/Throttling

• Apple's Network Link Conditioner, part of Hardware IO Tools for XCode
• Grapher, bundled with OS X, is great for making basic 2D/3D plots