SQL Server: it's not cheap, but it's genuinely good. Live query plans, clustered columnstore indices, linked servers, rich SQL features.
Tableau: more than a dashboarding tool, it's actually a really good multivariate exploratory data analysis (EDA) tool. You can use it to visualize multidimensional data easily. I do use Jupyter (seaborn, plotly) and R (ggplot2) which are good, but Tableau lets you touch your data and move stuff around in a more fluid fashion. The UI lets you really interact deeply with your data. I find that on a new dataset, I can get usable results out of Tableau faster than if were to muck around with ggplot2's syntax, even though I'm familiar with the latter. There is a learning curve for Tableau though, especially around how to structure your data for visualization (you have to think in SQL-like operations). It's not just dragging-and-dropping -- a certain mindset is required.
Active Directory: it's just there. It's pretty decent.
Visual Studio: I don't use this every day, but I do maintain a complex C# codebase from time to time (among other things), and Visual Studio (not VS Code! though I like VS Code too) is genuinely a pleasant IDE. I'm a big fan of the C# language and the integration with dev tooling is unparalleled e.g. solid refactoring, peeks, referencing, Intellisense, etc. The IDE supplies a ton of guards to help avoid human errors.
"Best" was an important keyword. The suppliers you mention are not always renowned for the user-friendliness of their tools, which - leaving aside any other flaws - is an important part of quality assessment.
Same. Someone asks about 'enterprise s/w' and everyone starts spouting their favorite 'commercial s/w' and apparently everyone seems to get along with it.
Is HN overrun by coding noobs who are pathologically handicapped in the size of their vocabulary? How the eff is 'IntelliJ' an enterprise s/w?
The tool indeed does a very good job from developer's point of view but when we see the end to end aspects of Datadog then the feeling changes. Previously when I was working as a DevOps Engineer, I remember how much our Head of Infrastructure was pissed with the shady licensing and pricing model of Datadog. Missing of detailed itemized billing, lack of proper access control (allowing who team can use which feature, can publish what metrics, etc.) makes the tool a pain in the long run. We even started to look for affordable alternatives to it.
It's crazy how easy it was to setup and cover all our infra (AWS, ELB, postgresql, cassandra, kafka, haproxy, nginx, etc...). The tool paid for itself with the infra optimizations we could find in the first month of usage.
It makes me sad when I'm forced to work with graphite/prometheus/grafana in my newer company. These can't gather half the metrics and their charting capabilities are so bad in comparison.
+1 for Datadog. I can't comprehend how they scale to accommodate the data we send them, let alone everyone else. Literally tens of thousands of data points per second, around the clock, for years. Thousands and thousands of unique keys. And it's all queryable instantaneously. All for about 1/4 of a developer's salary.
Datadog is nice as a user. It's pretty terrible as a person who cares about the budget.
Their pricing is pretty ridiculous at times and their sales people are often way over aggressive. You have to pay extra for containers on a host. They also make it impossible to keep users from consuming additional paid features.
I like having Datadog when I need to debug, but I'm pretty sick of the dark patterns and surprise bills. I'll probably go with Prometheus in my next greenfield.
I've tried not to be impressed by airtable, but their on the fly API documentation generators for how you configure things still feels like black magic.
Every time I want to be dismissive of the product, it's exceeded what I believed to be an extremely unlikely to meet set of expectations.
They've clearly got some pretty competent people. I'd love to draft them somehow
Beyond that, the services of namecheap Ava digital ocean. They clearly have developers who rely on the product. All the elements are there and they work well.
Azure's python libraries I find way easier than AWS's boto3, which for some reason always reminds me of dbus programming. I keep meaning to try Google's bud I haven't yet.
I also have been meaning to write one that somehow transparently uses things like rsync/scp with some partitioning strategy so you can migrate say a personal project costing you $50/month, generating you $0 and used by only a few dozen people to potentially a lot less.
(I've got numerous large scale efforts that almost nobody uses...)
Airtable also gets my vote, but not having webhooks or even a way to delete an entire base's set of items really grinds my gears as the workarounds are so inelegant (currently I have a script that deletes several thousand rows in batches which works well but seems inane).
what is an on the fly API documentation generator? Is it that you say what your lang and stack is and they tailor the documentation to just the lang and stack you're using?
It Just Works™. Which you'd just take for granted with something as simple as MFA, but we had two previous enterprise products that were garbage. Duo just does its thing, gets out of the way, and I can keep working.
It is one of those things you appreciate because you never think about it.
Huh I have used Duo for years and had no idea they were owned by Cisco. Agree with you though - I don't spend more than a few seconds a day interacting with it, but it gets the job done painlessly.
Since the web interface now supports U2F and Touch ID, I agree. But on the command-line I'm still stuck with Duo Push, which feels clunky by comparison.
Windows MFA requires an internet connection which is a bit of a problem. Makes it either trivial to bypass or impossible to log in without an internet connection.
LanSweeper. It's the primary asset tracker/scanner we use for our local network of over 3000 network devices. It can read switch data to even provide a means of finding what port a device is connected to on a switch.
Combine with ArcGIS to physically trace thousands of network cables and hundreds of fiber trunks and runs, we're able to have immediate access/knowledge of where any asset is located virtually and physically as well as the entire physical path between each point. These two tools have allowed us to migrate from knowledge only being saved in the memory of a few individuals to being preserved via documentation.
What data is being lifted out to ArcGIS? Could you give some examples? Do you have GPS units on your racks or something? I've never used ArcGIS at a very small scale like a building. Are these static maps or dynamic webapps published to a GIS portal?
I love using Tableau. It has completely changed the way I analyze data -- things that would have taken me a minute or two in Excel takes literally seconds in Tableau.
1) nimbletext. when clients send me excel sheets with tons of data to import i would generate insert statements in the sheets themselves. this is a painful experience. Then i found out about nimbletext. its pure joy to use.
2) jailer. I'm a visual kind of guy. so this makes database analysis very easy.
3) onenote. if only it had Linux app i would use it for personal use.
4) visual studio 2019. customized to the bone to be uber productive
5) Autohotkey. got a ms 4000 ergonomic keyboard and binding all keys a journey in itself
I'll stop right here but i have tons of other tools i really enjoy using.
For me, I have to say it, it's MS Outlook. I do e-mail all day every day and I use VBA macros and all sorts of shortcuts to make it very useful. Love it.
I've been enamored by Pipedream (https://pipedream.com) because as a Product Manager with engineering background, I can quickly hack together prototypes and get good feedback from customers :) . Pretty sure there are other nocode software but this is great for me.
What kind of stuff do you use it for? I watched the intro video and I get it would be useful for "monitoring" Twitter and stuff like that, but are there more practical day-to-day uses for it?
- UltraEdit. What Photoshop is to images, UltraEdit is to text. The weird thing is, it’s not a super flashy or even immediately intuitive tool. But once you get the hang of it, it never fails to deliver.
- Excel. It’s insane the breadth of stuff you can do with it. And as a tool, it’s equally handy and “oh my God this will save me so much work” for a school teacher as it is for a data analyst and stock broker. It sort of scales infinitely, there is always one more level of complexity/usefulness to unlock.
I have very mixed feelings about Excel, having been using it intensively over the last year where I never did before. It has a large number of components with overlapping functionality, apparently designed by separate teams at different times, all missing crucial functionality when I want to make some sort of BI type of solution. You have DAX, you have VBA, you have Power Query, you have the Data Model. And every new area I delve into, after I use it for a few hours, starts giving me weird errors and possibly corrupting my file. The latest is a dialog with a button that says "Send a Frown".
Quote from someone that is not me and not my particular issue, but that expresses the sort of problems endemic to Excel and MS software in general:
"When data is refreshed, I get a message box "Send a Frown" at unpredictable, inconsistent intervals. For example, it will work seamlessly for five or six times then suddenly it will fail, and give this "Send a frown" message.
A normal VBA error handler does not deal with this "Send a frown" message. Not even an "On Error Resume next" deals with it. I can thus not capture or step-over the error (err) and deal with it in my code. When the "Send a frown" message appears, the entire process is on hold until I (the human) clicks on "Send a frown" or "Cancel". This is problematic since this process runs 3am in the morning on our servers for about 200 connection refreshes."
I got a personal license for UltraEdit years ago too after using it at work (these fancy Electron editors didn't exist back then).
It definitely isn't fancy but it works well for larger files and things like column mode and perl regex searches are just so nice in certain cases. I'm finding it hard to put down especially since I do a lot of Perl and I haven't found a big benefit for an IDE there.
GrabCAD. It's free, simple cloud-based version control for CAD files. I don't think they actually offer an enterprise (on-prem) version anymore but I would still consider it enterprise software.
The only alternatives are network shares filled with v1_v2_final_edited filenames and very expensive, SAP-level of complexity and JIRA-style approval workflows.
Unfortunately they are owned by Stratasys, the Oracle of 3D printing and the product is barely maintained. When it was acquired they made it free. It was meant to become the github (in terms of de facto standard for public repositories) of 3D CAD, and be an inroad to 3D printer / 3D printing service sales. But that aspect never took off, Stratasys is bleeding marketshare and an at any time I expect to login and see that the service is discontinued.
Getting off-topic but I'm interested to see if there are any replies:
For all software engineers reading this, I can't state how behind other engineering disciplines are compared to software. The equivalent to git or SVN or even CVS never appeared as standard practice and there is barely any middle ground between no version control whatsoever and formal change control boards (which is no version control whatsoever except at a few milestones and if you're lucky you can verify a change to the milestone by checking a paper or dvd).
Outside of software, academic spin-offs tend to start with good practices, such as markdown or latex files for documentation, which work well with version control, but never seem to make it more than 5 years before they reach a state of no control / word documents.
Electrical CAD is becoming better, with more software-background hobbyist and more open source tools arriving. It helps that design files and manufacturing files started to converge in the 80s due to early automation and thus tend to be text-based and diffable. Mechanical CAD on the other hand tends to be somewhat incompatible between vendors and binary in nature. The open source alternatives (FreeCAD and OpenSCAD) are a decade away from providing 1990s features and hobbyists have free licenses to proprietary software (eg Fusion 360) so there is very little pressure to make a good tools in the open source world.
JIRA. It's powerful, customizable, flexible and drives workflows and productivity across millions of companies around the world. It's the SAP of issue tracking. Despite all the baggage, they still try continuously to improve the UX of the software so it stays relevant and relatively usable.
There's definitely problems with it (its performance can be awful and require dedicated server clusters to keep it up at larger orgs), but come on let's be honest, it's a huge success story and lets orgs do things "their way" with project management and software development.
Do you have much experience with gdb+openocd+<generic SWD/JTAG>?
Aside from a couple chip vendor's IDEs (Analog Devices and Atmel, both at a previous employer), I've always used the open source stack for embedded debugging and found it adequate. Just wondering what I'm missing out on?
While there are certainly some rough edges in the OSS stack, they've been no worse than the commercial solutions I've tried. And at least in principle, I can fix issues in the OSS tooling.
Funny but I had the exact opposite experience with it back when I worked in the space like 10 years ago. The software was clunky and borderline unusable, every bit of the system was proprietary (I remember we had to pay $10K a pop for connector cables, which each came with their own limited license), support was clueless, and there was no ecosystem to speak of (again due to their tight controls).
Splunk is an incredible tool. It is powerful, fast, and just a joy to use. The skill floor is low and the ceiling is high. Only minor complaint is the APIs have essentially no documentation if you want to interact with it programmatically (yes, there is some documentation, but it only covered like 10-20% of the interface last time I looked).
Everything I've used from Hashicorp has been good once you learn it. Vault is better than anything that came before it. Terraform is better than anything that came before it. Packer is excellent. Gonna try using consul connect for my next project. The learning curve is pretty steep on these things, but they are definitely force multipliers.
I'm also gonna say Eclipse. It seems to get a lot of hate, but I've used it so much for so long that it feels very natural. I've mostly switched to VSCode, but that is more a function of moving on to new languages that are better supported in VSCode.
[+] [-] wenc|5 years ago|reply
SQL Server: it's not cheap, but it's genuinely good. Live query plans, clustered columnstore indices, linked servers, rich SQL features.
Tableau: more than a dashboarding tool, it's actually a really good multivariate exploratory data analysis (EDA) tool. You can use it to visualize multidimensional data easily. I do use Jupyter (seaborn, plotly) and R (ggplot2) which are good, but Tableau lets you touch your data and move stuff around in a more fluid fashion. The UI lets you really interact deeply with your data. I find that on a new dataset, I can get usable results out of Tableau faster than if were to muck around with ggplot2's syntax, even though I'm familiar with the latter. There is a learning curve for Tableau though, especially around how to structure your data for visualization (you have to think in SQL-like operations). It's not just dragging-and-dropping -- a certain mindset is required.
Active Directory: it's just there. It's pretty decent.
Visual Studio: I don't use this every day, but I do maintain a complex C# codebase from time to time (among other things), and Visual Studio (not VS Code! though I like VS Code too) is genuinely a pleasant IDE. I'm a big fan of the C# language and the integration with dev tooling is unparalleled e.g. solid refactoring, peeks, referencing, Intellisense, etc. The IDE supplies a ton of guards to help avoid human errors.
Splunk: it's good. Not the cheapest though.
[+] [-] PeterStuer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcpherrinm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mellosouls|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GoblinSlayer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fizixer|5 years ago|reply
Is HN overrun by coding noobs who are pathologically handicapped in the size of their vocabulary? How the eff is 'IntelliJ' an enterprise s/w?
[+] [-] adrianbordinc|5 years ago|reply
I can find out what’s wrong within a few seconds.
[+] [-] siddharthgoel88|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user5994461|5 years ago|reply
It's crazy how easy it was to setup and cover all our infra (AWS, ELB, postgresql, cassandra, kafka, haproxy, nginx, etc...). The tool paid for itself with the infra optimizations we could find in the first month of usage.
It makes me sad when I'm forced to work with graphite/prometheus/grafana in my newer company. These can't gather half the metrics and their charting capabilities are so bad in comparison.
[+] [-] ttul|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seneca|5 years ago|reply
Their pricing is pretty ridiculous at times and their sales people are often way over aggressive. You have to pay extra for containers on a host. They also make it impossible to keep users from consuming additional paid features.
I like having Datadog when I need to debug, but I'm pretty sick of the dark patterns and surprise bills. I'll probably go with Prometheus in my next greenfield.
[+] [-] kristopolous|5 years ago|reply
Every time I want to be dismissive of the product, it's exceeded what I believed to be an extremely unlikely to meet set of expectations.
They've clearly got some pretty competent people. I'd love to draft them somehow
Beyond that, the services of namecheap Ava digital ocean. They clearly have developers who rely on the product. All the elements are there and they work well.
Azure's python libraries I find way easier than AWS's boto3, which for some reason always reminds me of dbus programming. I keep meaning to try Google's bud I haven't yet.
I also have been meaning to write one that somehow transparently uses things like rsync/scp with some partitioning strategy so you can migrate say a personal project costing you $50/month, generating you $0 and used by only a few dozen people to potentially a lot less.
(I've got numerous large scale efforts that almost nobody uses...)
[+] [-] petercooper|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newspheasant|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamwil|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Someone1234|5 years ago|reply
It Just Works™. Which you'd just take for granted with something as simple as MFA, but we had two previous enterprise products that were garbage. Duo just does its thing, gets out of the way, and I can keep working.
It is one of those things you appreciate because you never think about it.
[+] [-] jftuga|5 years ago|reply
https://github.com/jftuga/gofwd
[+] [-] paxys|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ttul|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] closeparen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cameronh90|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koheripbal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pinacarlos90|5 years ago|reply
there a bunch of other tools I use/love but I'm not sure they would qualify as 'enterprise', but here they are just in case:
VScode, notepad++, Agent Ransack, code compare, Dark reader chrome extension, Fork (git-client tool for MacOS),linqPad
[+] [-] DigitallyFidget|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blitmap|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blaser-waffle|5 years ago|reply
How does LANSweeper detect devices? CDP, SNMP, etc?
[+] [-] thehappypm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supernova87a|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jokab|5 years ago|reply
2) jailer. I'm a visual kind of guy. so this makes database analysis very easy.
3) onenote. if only it had Linux app i would use it for personal use.
4) visual studio 2019. customized to the bone to be uber productive
5) Autohotkey. got a ms 4000 ergonomic keyboard and binding all keys a journey in itself
I'll stop right here but i have tons of other tools i really enjoy using.
[+] [-] SMAAART|5 years ago|reply
When you've maxed out on what you can do with spreadsheets.
[+] [-] avipars|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatsmyusername|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bonfire|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmurthy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wackget|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edelans|5 years ago|reply
Could you please share some example usecases you implemented ?
[+] [-] InvOfSmallC|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leokennis|5 years ago|reply
- UltraEdit. What Photoshop is to images, UltraEdit is to text. The weird thing is, it’s not a super flashy or even immediately intuitive tool. But once you get the hang of it, it never fails to deliver.
- Excel. It’s insane the breadth of stuff you can do with it. And as a tool, it’s equally handy and “oh my God this will save me so much work” for a school teacher as it is for a data analyst and stock broker. It sort of scales infinitely, there is always one more level of complexity/usefulness to unlock.
[+] [-] perl4ever|5 years ago|reply
Quote from someone that is not me and not my particular issue, but that expresses the sort of problems endemic to Excel and MS software in general:
"When data is refreshed, I get a message box "Send a Frown" at unpredictable, inconsistent intervals. For example, it will work seamlessly for five or six times then suddenly it will fail, and give this "Send a frown" message.
A normal VBA error handler does not deal with this "Send a frown" message. Not even an "On Error Resume next" deals with it. I can thus not capture or step-over the error (err) and deal with it in my code. When the "Send a frown" message appears, the entire process is on hold until I (the human) clicks on "Send a frown" or "Cancel". This is problematic since this process runs 3am in the morning on our servers for about 200 connection refreshes."
[+] [-] hnick|5 years ago|reply
It definitely isn't fancy but it works well for larger files and things like column mode and perl regex searches are just so nice in certain cases. I'm finding it hard to put down especially since I do a lot of Perl and I haven't found a big benefit for an IDE there.
[+] [-] enchiridion|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkr|5 years ago|reply
* DataDog (distributed tracing is a dream)
* IntelliJ (idea, goland, pycharm, clion, datagrip)
* MindNode (macOS-only mind-mapping software)
Recently started using smart sheets, but on the fence about this one so far.
[+] [-] johnwalkr|5 years ago|reply
The only alternatives are network shares filled with v1_v2_final_edited filenames and very expensive, SAP-level of complexity and JIRA-style approval workflows.
Unfortunately they are owned by Stratasys, the Oracle of 3D printing and the product is barely maintained. When it was acquired they made it free. It was meant to become the github (in terms of de facto standard for public repositories) of 3D CAD, and be an inroad to 3D printer / 3D printing service sales. But that aspect never took off, Stratasys is bleeding marketshare and an at any time I expect to login and see that the service is discontinued.
Getting off-topic but I'm interested to see if there are any replies:
For all software engineers reading this, I can't state how behind other engineering disciplines are compared to software. The equivalent to git or SVN or even CVS never appeared as standard practice and there is barely any middle ground between no version control whatsoever and formal change control boards (which is no version control whatsoever except at a few milestones and if you're lucky you can verify a change to the milestone by checking a paper or dvd).
Outside of software, academic spin-offs tend to start with good practices, such as markdown or latex files for documentation, which work well with version control, but never seem to make it more than 5 years before they reach a state of no control / word documents.
Electrical CAD is becoming better, with more software-background hobbyist and more open source tools arriving. It helps that design files and manufacturing files started to converge in the 80s due to early automation and thus tend to be text-based and diffable. Mechanical CAD on the other hand tends to be somewhat incompatible between vendors and binary in nature. The open source alternatives (FreeCAD and OpenSCAD) are a decade away from providing 1990s features and hobbyists have free licenses to proprietary software (eg Fusion 360) so there is very little pressure to make a good tools in the open source world.
[+] [-] davedx|5 years ago|reply
There's definitely problems with it (its performance can be awful and require dedicated server clusters to keep it up at larger orgs), but come on let's be honest, it's a huge success story and lets orgs do things "their way" with project management and software development.
[+] [-] waiseristy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bacon_waffle|5 years ago|reply
Aside from a couple chip vendor's IDEs (Analog Devices and Atmel, both at a previous employer), I've always used the open source stack for embedded debugging and found it adequate. Just wondering what I'm missing out on?
While there are certainly some rough edges in the OSS stack, they've been no worse than the commercial solutions I've tried. And at least in principle, I can fix issues in the OSS tooling.
[+] [-] paxys|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adjkant|5 years ago|reply
Okta - Just works, good UI
Workday - I seem to be in the minority but the clean UI + generally decent tooling allows for a decent deal to be in there
[+] [-] time0ut|5 years ago|reply
Everything I've used from Hashicorp has been good once you learn it. Vault is better than anything that came before it. Terraform is better than anything that came before it. Packer is excellent. Gonna try using consul connect for my next project. The learning curve is pretty steep on these things, but they are definitely force multipliers.
I'm also gonna say Eclipse. It seems to get a lot of hate, but I've used it so much for so long that it feels very natural. I've mostly switched to VSCode, but that is more a function of moving on to new languages that are better supported in VSCode.