Hardware Requirements
I firmly believe every developer should have at least these very basic items:
- An Intel® Core™ i7 Processor which supports virtualization
- Solid State Disk
- 6GB or more of RAM
- Dual (or more) Monitor setup with at least 1920*1080 resolution
- Mechanical Keyboard with Cherry MX Blue Switches
- Mouse with Back and Forward button
- A good pair of headphones
These might push you a little bit out of your budget (especially considering the SSDs which are still relatively expensive), but it’s worth the less amount of frustration and the increased comfortableness.
A Mechanical Keyboard isn't really required but for a person who spends most of his day typing I think it’s very satisfactory having the feedback and comfort of a mechanical keyboard instead of a rubber dome!
Software Requirements
- ReSharper (if you’re a .NET Developer)
- Chocolatey
- Notepad++
- FileZilla Client
- f.lux
- 7-zip
- Chrome DevTools
Website Accounts
- Feedly
- Stack Overflow
- GitHub
- Microsoft Azure, AWS or Digital Ocean (if you're low on budget)
Blogs
There are a ton of good blogs out there and it takes quite a while to build a good blog list. A good blog list is one that you have built yourself and that you have tailored to your tastes. You can have a look at my Feedly Collections, but some of my favorites are:
Programming
- Scott Hanselman’s Blog
- Troy Hunt’s Blog
- ScottGu’s Blog
- Jon Skeet’s Coding Blog
- Coding Horror
- High Scalability
- Channel 9
Design
General Tech
There’s a ton of other blogs which have really good content and don’t hesitate to look for blogs that suite you. Again, you can follow me on Feedly for a quick start, but there is no better way to enjoy blogs rather than when they are optimized to your liking.
Podcasts
Currently I’m catching up on the CodingBlocks episodes and they are really interesting. I still haven't built an extensive library for podcasts but I think I just might start. Scott Hanselman also has a podcast called The Hanselminutes which I sometimes listen to.
Books
I must admit, I don’t read as much as I would like. It’s not that I don’t have time, but for some reason I prefer to watch a YouTube talk than reading a book.
However there is one book that I have read from cover to cover and that I am very passionate about: C# in Depth by Jon Skeet. I would recommend this book without hesitation to any .NET Developer and apparently I’m not alone!
Jon Skeet is a software engineer who currently works for Google. He has recently gained minor celebrity within the developer community by becoming a prolific contributor to StackOverflow. At the time of writing he has totaled 32,925 answers in the 7 years he's been registered. This works out at roughly 400 questions answered per month!
Anything I have skipped? If you think there’s anything I have missed or if you don't agree with something or would like to add something, just comment or tweet @chridemi! I would love to hear your say; maybe I discover some new tools and include them in this post.