Tools of Choice
Where possible, my preference is to use good quality open source or freeware software, especially to keep costs down, but sometimes there is a paid-for tool which is in a class of its own compared with the free alternatives, and pays for itself in time saved. All tools below are free to use in a commercial setting (at time of writing) unless stated otherwise.
Inclusion in this list implies that the tool is something I have used or evaluated to some degree. It does not necessarily mean that it is the right tool for the job in all circumstances, nor does it necessarily imply expertise in its use, although in many cases this will be true.
| Category | Tool |
| KNIME Analytics Platform | KNIME My go-to “swiss army knife” for data manipulation and wrangling. And its free (Open Source) You’ll often find me on the KNIME Community Forum |
| File Comparison and Directory Sync Utility | Beyond Compare (commercial – yes, there are free comparison tools available but I have yet to find one to match Beyond Compare) WinMerge I don’t find it quite as friendly as Beyond Compare, but it is free (Open Source) and it does a decent job. |
| Text Editor | Visual Studio Code (aka VS Code) This is my go-to editor of the last couple of years. It has so many features and plugins that it can feel overwhelming. I have only touched the surface of its capabilities, but it is an amazing free editor. Notepad++ Superb freeware text editor with some useful plugins and syntax highlighting for multiple computer languages. If you work with xml files at all, I strongly recommend loading the xml plugin. Great for both formatting (“pretty printing”) and xml validation. |
| General Purpose Scripting Language | Python Superb language for throwing together a useful script in almost no time, whether for accessing a database or as a replacement to ms-dos/powershell scripts. Also useful to know for Data Science work, and can be incorporated into KNIME workflows. |
| General Purpose Language | Java (but ideally for me, using OpenJDK where possible as Oracle recently introduced development licensing charges. However, cost is not the only story here so choose according to needs) |
| Language Editor / IDE | Visual Studio Code PyCharm |
| Heavyweight IDE | Eclipse |
| Oracle SQL Development | SQL Developer I was always a SQL*Plus advocate even though that is incredibly basic, but SQL Developer is my mainstay. The likes of TOAD and PL/SQL Developer are great tools, but they cost money, and SQL Developer does pretty much all I need it to. (I wish it didn’t just “randomly” freeze periodically though!) |
| ETL Tools | See “KNIME Analytics Platform” |
| Data Science / Data Workflow Tool | KNIME Jupyter Notebooks Python Alteryx (commercial – It’s a good tool but personally I cannot justify the extremely high price when compared with KNIME (open source). In my limited comparison, I also find KNIME more friendly and consistent in its interface, and a lot more flexible with its workflows. But Alteryx has strengths in certain areas, and my views come from a technical software development perspective, whereas a pure analytics/data science person may well prefer Alteryx) |
| Software Configuration Management (Version Control) | git subversion |
| SCM Client | (git) TortoiseGIT (svn) TortoiseSVN |
| Mind Map Editor | FreeMind Once you have used it a few times, it just becomes second nature. I use it for brain-dumping ideas, and I find I can concentrate on putting the ideas down (which is the goal), rather than concentrating on the software! |
| Schema Diagramming | yEd Not for everybody, but actually its amazingly powerful especially when you work out how to turn lists of tables and relationships written in Excel into a schema diagram, and let the tool do the laying out. Give me this over Visio any day! |
| Concepts Diagramming | Visual Understanding Environment A good diagramming, and concepts tool. Better than many paid alternatives. Online diagramming: https://app.diagrams.net/ This is a great online tool for creating great charts very quickly. |
| Website Building | WordPress For basic brochure-ware/magazine style sites, I’m hard-pressed to recommend anything other than WordPress. Joomla is also good, and to some extent it’s personal preference, but I found WordPress easier to understand and set up after the initial short learning curve and experimentation. WordPress is now my go-to now unless needing an ecommerce site in which case there may be better alternatives that should be investigated based on specific needs. |
| ftp client | Filezilla It’s the open source ftp client I always go to. |
| Online Brainstorming and whiteboarding | Mural Definitely worth a look at the “free forever” plan |