Really Useful Things

Here are five things that help my quest to reduce the amount of time I spend supporting and increase the amount of time I spend doing:

  • Google Apps for Business – £3.30 per user per month, and it means I can use Google Drive (although an Ubuntu client that isn’t InSync would rock) to hold PDFs and reference data I use all the time, and not have to worry about email hosting.
  • LastPass – password management. Much easier than having a GPG-encrypted text file that you sync to DropBox. Premium is only $12 (£8) per year.
  • GitHub – online project hosting using Git. I use GitHub by default for almost everything I do, private and public. A snip at $7 (£4.60) per month.
  • Atlassian Hosted JIRA – which, love it or hate it, works well for OpenTrainTimes bug tracking. Reasonably priced at $10 (£6) per month for up to 10 users.
  • Evernote Premium – write notes, sync them automatically and go search. I still love my Moleskine notebook for taking most meeting notes, and it looks great too – but sometimes you just gotta type electronically. £4 per month, but I really wish they’d come up with a sensible client for Ubuntu.