Question: What is your favourite tool you`ve used?

Guy Rixon answered on 14 Mar 2018:

That’s a good question. Software engineers use a lot of tools. Some are “nice” (easy, comfortable) to use but don’t do so much and we could work without them. So are horrible to use, but we can’t do the work any other way.
The most *essential* tool for me, now, is the relational-database system PostgreSQL. This stores the data for our part of the Gaia mission and we couldn’t do without it. But it’s hard to use it well.
The one I use daily is an “Integrated Development Environment” for Java called Netbeans. This is where I write, edit, test and debug source code. If Netbeans went away, I could still do my job, but it would be much slower and harder and more prone to errors.
Some people would call email a “tool”. If you like that definitions, then email is my tool of choice. Couldn’t do thing one without it, these days, in science.