
Show HN: A mostly complete 2014 "Tools of the Trade" - cjbarber
https://github.com/cjbarber/ToolsOfTheTrade
======
rdtsc
Is anyone surprised that so many of those are payed services instead of OSS
projects?

I understand payroll, analytics and others like such. But things like bug
trackers, dashboards, CIs, exception handling, log monitoring. At some level
maybe it is a bit like selling shovels during a gold rush. Find what most
start-ups need and monetize that. The gold prospector has a high chance of
going home empty-handed, but he will surely need a shovel to even start
digging.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> Is anyone surprised that so many of those are payed services instead of OSS
> projects?

No. Developer time is expensive, whether you're contracting it out or you're
paying for it amortized over salary/benefits/etc.

If its going to take more than 4-8 hours to setup and/or more than 1-2/hours a
month to maintain, I'd rather get a credit card out and just pay for it.

Do what you're best at, outsource everything else.

~~~
jiggy2011
I'd rather use an OSS solution but pay someone else to host and maintain it,
that way if they shut down or whatever I can just copy my data and worst case
run it myself.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Does it need to be an OSS solution as long as the data can be exported at will
into a standards compliant format?

~~~
rmc
"Standards compliant format" can be misleading. Sure, an app might give you a
zip file of CSV files (which is as 'standard' and 'humanily readable' as you
can get), but that doesn't mean you'll be able to import it into another
tool/software. The data model could be completly different.

~~~
eli
Good point... but likewise: just because an app is OSS doesn't mean it's data
is portable.

~~~
rmc
It does. You can run any version of any OSS programme with or without any
custom patches you write. You can obviously import that zip-of-csvs into that
programme.

~~~
eli
Maybe I phrased that poorly. All data that can be retrieved or viewed can also
be exported with enough effort. But OSS doesn't guarantee that process will
always be easy and hosted, closed-source doesn't guarantee it will be hard.

------
23andwalnut
It's a great list, but I don't understand why it's limited to SaaS. Self
hosted apps could definitely be considered "tools of the trade". Perhaps I'm
just biased because I sell a self hosted project management app -
[http://duetapp.com](http://duetapp.com), but it seems like an arbitrary
distinction....

~~~
pc86
OT to the post, but is there a reason you went the self-hosted route rather
than SaaS?

~~~
23andwalnut
Short story - It's a product that I needed that didn't exist. There are only a
handful of self hosted project management apps and none of them felt like the
right fit, especially with regard to UX. After a couple of years of waiting I
finally decided to build it myself.

I wrote about some other reasons on my blog (i.e. cost), but the primary
reason is that I wanted it for myself. Here are the links to the blog posts if
you're interested in reading more about my thought process:

[http://www.duetapp.com/blog/no-more-project-management-
apps/](http://www.duetapp.com/blog/no-more-project-management-apps/)

[http://www.duetapp.com/blog/is-saas-the-only-business-
model-...](http://www.duetapp.com/blog/is-saas-the-only-business-model-for-
the-web/)

~~~
pc86
Thanks! It's always interesting to hear the thought process behind
entrepreneurs choosing a path that isn't the norm (since SaaS does seem to be
the default path for better or worse).

------
mverwijs
> Jenkins | [http://jenkins-ci.org](http://jenkins-ci.org) | @jenkinsci |
> $60/mo - $200/mo

AFAIK, and can tell from the [http://jenkins-ci.org](http://jenkins-ci.org)
site linked, Jenkins is still free (libre and gratuit).

------
voltagex_
Another updated list of tools and utilities:
[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2014UltimateDev...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2014UltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolListForWindows.aspx)

------
pling
Pay pay pay pay pay pay pay.

I have all of that and pay nothing. It builds up otherwise very rapidly.

For example the company I work for currently churns out a mere $16k a year for
JIRA now that the pay pay pay has caught up...

~~~
prawks
You have to pick your poison: build up subscription costs, or build up support
costs to maintain your own deployments. Depending on your budget, the number
of users, the need, the support contract with the vendor, and your priorities,
the costs can go either way. That's the premise that both ___ as a service and
___ proprietary software selling support contracts are built upon.

~~~
pling
Or avoid the tool treadmill to start with...

That is my philosophy.

Managing licenses sometimes has a large overhead as well.

------
sikhnerd
Created a PR for a basic table of contents, I can see this being pretty useful
when the need arises.

~~~
igravious
Wouldn't hurt to alphabetise the individual content lists either.

------
Zweihander
What happened to all the applications and services for outsourcing HR
departments in terms of payroll, benefits, ect.? -- thought there were a bunch
more than Workday and ZenPayroll?

Getting a full list of those would be particularly useful.

~~~
andyzweb
ADP off the top of my head

------
joeblau
We tried to use Airbrake at the last startup I contracted for and it was
embarrassingly underwhelming. The landing page makes it look awesome, but
compared to HoneyBadger, it was just not up to par when it came to error
notification. We were looking for centralized errors for Ruby and Python code
so we ended up going with Rollbar.

Airbrake shirts are great though.

------
yonasb
Nice job Chris! If anyone wants to see feedback from other developers about
these tools, the majority of them are on
[http://leanstack.io/popular](http://leanstack.io/popular) (disclaimer:
Founder of Leanstack.io here).

~~~
narsil
Nice app. I noticed vendors can't self-select a category. That might be a
useful feature for services that want to identify themselves in a category
that isn't immediately clear. For example, the lines could blur between File
Storage and Cloud Storage.

~~~
yonasb
Thanks! Self-selecting for categories could get tricky because we're regularly
creating and deleting categories as we see fit. We'd rather stay on top of
that than put the burden on vendors. But we usually do make edits if a vendor
asks.

------
vacri
Why are there two different Log Monitoring sections, with no overlap in tools?

An alphabetisation of section headings and a clickable Table of Contents would
be good, given the pretty comprehensive nature of the list.

~~~
vangale
I think it's because the list is being built by pull requests. Two people
submit a Log Monitoring section at the same time and the repo owner merges
without really paying attention.

------
narsil
I created a PR for a Cloud Storage section since I didn't notice one yet and
added [https://kloudless.com](https://kloudless.com) to it. (disclosure: co-
founder of Kloudless here).

Google Docs is probably the closest cloud storage-related utility on that
list, but is under the "Notes" category.

------
smit
Awesome list.

I recommend adding ToutApp([http://toutapp.com](http://toutapp.com)) under
sales tools.

------
_pmf_
It's fascinating that the proliferation of EC2 has enabled services by
different vendors to be provided on virtually the same physical network (with
associated performance).

Much of what is attributed to the rise of SaaS and "The Cloud" is in fact a
direct consequence of Amazon's infrastructure.

~~~
ansimionescu
> Much of what is attributed to the rise of SaaS and "My Butt" is in fact a
> direct consequence of Amazon's infrastructure.

Gotta love #cloudtobutt [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-
butt-plus...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-
plus/apmlngnhgbnjpajelfkmabhkfapgnoai)

------
GhotiFish
As a small time developer, none of these tools is in my budget, I have no
budget. So this list is useless to me.

Ok sure, I wasn't your target audience, that's fine. but the title doesn't
suggest "Tools for active/established companies who have money to burn and
needs to fill"

------
michaelbuckbee
List only has (the neat) Hirefire under Heroku tools, here's a list of 60
separate Heroku tools:

[https://www.expeditedssl.com/pages/the-hot-and-heavy-list-
of...](https://www.expeditedssl.com/pages/the-hot-and-heavy-list-of-heroku-
development-resources)

------
mikeknoop
This list does a great job of curating the most popular apps by category.

There's a ton of long-tail to SaaS these days. I've heard a lot of people use
our app directory to discover some of them:
[https://zapier.com/zapbook](https://zapier.com/zapbook)

------
corford
Great list. Created a PR for gosquared, datadog and rsync.net as I couldn't
see them on there.

~~~
rsync
Thanks! You may be interested to know that we just announced Petabyte and
larger file systems at 3 c/GB...

------
analogj
You guys seem to be missing Wercker.
[http://wercker.com/](http://wercker.com/) is my favorite CI/CD. Its free
while its in beta, has a great UI and has a simple but powerful configuration
system

------
johnx123-up
[http://www.cssilize.com/](http://www.cssilize.com/) ($35) and
[https://sudopay.com/](https://sudopay.com/) ($29) were discussed here before.

------
ntakasaki
I missing the web directories of yore that have such nice lists. Search
engines only bring up a few relevant results and the rest are all keyword and
link stuffed. Hope you take some pull requests or make this a wiki.

~~~
vxNsr
This is a very valid point, the other day I was looking for a wifi sniffer
tool because I was getting terrible speeds over the last couple weeks and I
wanted to ascertain the cause; there was nothing recently put out that
compared more than 2 products, nearly all the blog posts were from 3-4 years
ago, and the tools they compared were either bought out by cisco and the like
or went out of business/ended support. really just having this type of list
would be huge.

------
DrFunke
"ElasticSales is currently booked out for the rest of the year and therefore
not able to accept any new clients at the moment."

Any alternative Sales as a Service recommendations?

~~~
vangale
I don't know much (anything?) about sales, but these guys look like an
alternative:
[http://www.generationsalesgroup.com/](http://www.generationsalesgroup.com/)

------
chatmasta
I would add Chargebee for recurring billing and Scout for server monitoring.
Two polished, quality tools with solid teams behind them.

~~~
adivik2000
Thank you! Added it to the list. :)

------
rak
[https://hakiri.io/](https://hakiri.io/) would be a nice tool to add to this
list.

------
hyp0
all services - do people still pay for code? i.e. commercial libraries

or has open source finally killed that business model?

~~~
sleepyhead
I wish there more open-source libs offering commercial options. I don't want
to see libraries I depend on being abandoned. Might also want to have access
to support. I'm sure there are many companies who would pay and still want the
project to be open source and have an active community. Sidekiq is one example
of this which seem to be going quite well. I think it is a problem that very
important projects are being developed for fun after work (openssl anyone).
While I do not want the "pay for all libs" like in the .net world I do hope to
see more for-profit open source projects.

------
wyclif
Github and Bitbucket "Issues"? I don't get that. Wonder if it's a typo.

~~~
CmonDev
Issue tracking? I have seen a private BitBucket repo with a public list of
issues. BitBucket provides private repos for free, unlike Github, by the way.

------
aagustyana
another tools for Remote Collaboration

\- GoToMeeting [http://gotomeeting.com/](http://gotomeeting.com/)

\- Zoom.us [http://zoom.us/](http://zoom.us/)

------
chandrew
I work at a startup and we do CRM and we aren't on there!

~~~
binarymax
Fork it, add your startup, and make a pull request :)

------
ilzmastr
waffle.io is hyperdope on the Bug/Issue Tracking side too. Makes GH issues
look like trello, and allows boards for multiple repos.

~~~
pm
Cheers, just been looking for this kind of thing, seeing as my workflow is
centered around GitHub.

------
nawitus
>Continuous Integration/Code Quality

There's Strider.

~~~
girvo
Which is a great app, but a bit rough around the edges currently. Getting
there though.

