Developers are a finicky bunch, and make use of a huge array of tools. Many of these tools are installed on an ad-hoc basis when required. Unfortunately, this often means that critical production support or development time needs to be wasted in order to get the tools downloaded and set up correctly. These minutes or hours can make a huge difference.
Even if you spend time thinking about what tools need to be installed on a developers machine, these installs take time. Keeping them up to date takes time. Reinstalling a developers machine takes time. And as we all know, time is money.
So, at Palantir, we not only came up with a list of the software we want our developers to have, but we scripted it all, so that installing a new machine is as easy as typing a one line command. Not only that, we’ve made this available to everyone.
We have a github repository which we keep up to date as we learn and improve. At the time of this article, the following software was installed by the script:
- Hyper-V
Packages
- Gow – GNU on Windows
Programming environments
- Node JS
- NPM
h4
Git
- git
- poshgit – PowerShell module which provides Git/PowerShell integration
- github – GitHub for Desktop
Editors
- SublimeText3 – Sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose
- Atom – Text editor that’s modern, approachable, yet hackable to the core
- visualstudiocode – Build and debug modern web and cloud applications
Visual Studio 2015
- visualstudio2015enterprise -packageParameters “–Features SQL”
SQL Server Express
- mssqlserver2012express
Install IIS
RavenDB
- ravendb
System Tools
- sysinternals – System Tools for Windows
- fiddler4 – Debugging web proxy
- windbg – Debugging tools for Windows
- wireshark – Network protocol analyzer
Developer Utilities
- linqpad4 – .NET Programmers Playground
- resharper – Productivity Tool for Visual Studio
- Paint .Net – Image and photo editing software
- diffmerge – Application to visually compare and merge files
- lockhunter – File unlocker
- stylecop – Enforce style and consistency rules
- papercut – Debug SMTP server
Ruby, Go, Python
- ruby
- ruby.devkit
- golang
- python
- pip – Python Package Index
- easy.install – Python Package installer
DevOps Stuff
- virtualbox
- virtualbox.extensionpack
- vagrant
Basics
- vlc – Media player
- GoogleChrome
- 7zip.install
- adobereader
- DotNet3.5