Three tools every one-man tech startup needs

When you’re programming a site on your own, I’ve found the following three tools to be indispensable.

1. FogBugz
You’re going to have lots of little tasks that you need to do (program a login page, set up your database, provision for catastrophic failures, etc.). Now, you can try and keep all this straight in your head. After all, you’re the only one working on a project, so it’s not like you need to communicate any of these tasks to someone else. However, if you’re not one of those lucky souls with a photographic memory, it may help to record all of these tasks somewhere. In comes FogBugz. They have an absolutely fantastic application for task tracking, and they have a free version of FogBugz for students and startups. Go try it out.

2. Beanstalk
If you’re programming anything of value you need version control. Sure, you may not have to worry about anyone else destroying your code, but there are countless ways that you can subvert yourself. Maybe you’re trying to refactor your code and it doesn’t turn out the way you hoped, so you need to go back to a prior version. Maybe you delete a file and realize after the fact that you really did need it. Maybe your hard drive dies and you lose everything. Who knows. One thing I do know? Version control will save your arse. Thankfully the good, fine folks over at Wildbit have this fancy application called Beanstalk that’s free up to 100mb. That’s a darn lot of code.

Oh, and as a nice bonus, Beanstalk integrates with FogBugz. Just includes [BugzID: 12345] in your commit message, where 12345 is your FogBugz case number, and your commit message will show up in FogBugz. Sweet!

3. NautilusSvn
If you’ve worked with Subversion on Windows then you probably know that there’s this nice application called TortoiseSVN. It integrates right into the Windows shell allowing you to do a checkout/update/commit/etc. with a simple right-click. I was missing that functionality on Ubuntu, until I found a great little application called NautilusSvn that does the same thing for the GNOME desktop. After installing it you’ll see little helper icons next to each file/directory indicating if the file matches what’s in the repository. That makes it incredibly easy to visually see what you’ve changed and what needs to be commited.