My Favorite Websites

I recently published a summary of the software and hardware I’m using every day. Now I’ll list my most favorite websites and online services, which help me do my daily job: write code and manage projects.

Gmail is the best email system. It aggregates all my accounts in one place: all emails are coming to the @gmail.com address and I have a few aliases for sending responses. Google Calendar helps me keep my plans in sync, and Google Drive helps me share documents with friends sometimes.

GitHub is where we keep our source code repositories. I was also using Bitbucket a few years ago, but didn’t really like it. GitHub is simply the best, no doubts.

Stack Overflow is where I learn new technologies, ask questions, answer them sometimes and really enjoy working with the community. When I have some free time I just search by “design-patterns” or “oop” tags in order to find relevant questions and answer them if I can.

Wring aggregates my GitHub notifications and helps me stay on top of all events that are happening there. It’s my own project and I use it every day.

Rultor is helping me merge pull requests, deploy my projects to production and release their new versions. It’s one of my pet projects and I’m using it every day.

Heroku is where I host almost all my Java and Ruby projects.

Travis for open source and Shippable for commercial projects, as continuous integration platforms. There are many alternatives, but I like these guys.

Godaddy is where I register all domain names. Their user interface is terrible, but their prices are the lowest. So, I’m with them for at least eight years already.

Google Analytics and Google Webmasters are two systems where I track my entire web traffic of all my websites. Both systems are terrible, performance and interface wise. But since it’s Google, we have to stay with them, to see how they understand web statistics. I’m also using hit.ua.

Hacker News and /r/programming at Reddit seem to be the best sources of news for me. I open them a few times a week.

Facebook and Twitter are the social networks I’m spamming regularly. They are far from being perfect, but they totally dominate the market. I was using these guys, but they seem to be ~~dead~~ less popular now: LinkedIn, Google+.

Amazon is where I buy everything that is not food or clothes.

AWS is where I keep all my data, my DNS, my servers, and some other things. I’m with them since they launched S3 (in 2006).

Contabo is where I host servers, which I need 24x7. Their prices are great and the service is pretty decent. I’m with them for at least five years.

Papertrail is where all my logs are being aggregated. I tried a few other systems, but these guys seem to be the best. I even was paying them something some time ago, but stopped—their free package seems to be sufficient enough for my volumes.

StatusCake is a website monitoring system that keeps an eye on all my web sites and web apps and notifies me by email and through Pushover ($5).

Sentry is where all my errors are being sent to, from production systems.

Buffer is helping me to spam Twitter and Facebook more effectively. I pay them for the premium package and have no regrets. The service really helps me deliver content to the social networks on schedule.

YouTube is where I keep my video content. I also stream my webinars there.

SoundCloud is where I’m listening to music and keep my own channel with Shift-M podcast and other audio content.

QuickBooks is where I keep all my bookkeeping accounts, for all my companies.

Did I forget anything?