As a software developer I love working in the terminal where I do most of my work.

iTerm2, zsh, vim, tmux became my favorite tools but there are many others I use pretty much on a daily basis.

Let’s take a look at some of them.

Homebrew

This one you probably already know. Homebrew is a fantastic package manager for macOS and Linux with an active community of developers on Github.

You can install nearly any software using Homebrew. Every command-line tool described in this blog post below can be installed as easy as running

brew install <tool name>

Homebrew also allows you to install Desktop applications:

brew cask install firefox

To search for particular software run:

brew search postgres

AWS Amplify is a development platform for building secure, scalable mobile and web applications. Amplify covers the complete application development workflow from version control, code testing, to production deployment, and it easily scales with your business from thousands of users to tens of millions.

What is a typical workflow for deploying a static website to Amazon AWS? You create a bucket in S3, set up Route 53 and Cloudfront. If you want the site to be built and deployed on every commit you might want to add CodePipeline or a CI/CD tool of your choice such as Travis CI or Circle CI.

But with Amplify you can simplify and automate the whole process and deploy your site with just a few commands.

Amazon Route 53 provides highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS), domain name registration, and health-checking web services. You can register a domain name in different TLDs such as .com or .net. There are two ways of doing so: using the web interface or command line. I’m going to use the latter in this blog post.

To follow along you must have the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) tool installed on your machine. If you don’t, here is a step by step guide from Amazon.

AWS Route 53 uses the us-east-1 endpoint. If you have a different region specified with aws configure (see in ~./aws/config) then it has to be updated to us-east-1 or you can specify the endpoint explicitly in every command.

You can join the discussion on HackerNews here.

I’ve been hearing about the Crystal programming language here and there over the last couple of years but never had a chance to give it a look until yesterday.

What is Crystal? It’s a statically typed, compiled, object-oriented language with syntax heavily inspired by Ruby’s.

The promise on its site is that the language is as fast as C, sleek as Ruby. This statement sounds exciting and makes you want to check how fast Crystal is comparing to Ruby. Of course, it won’t be a fair comparison since one is a compiled language and another is an interpreted one (the Ruby MRI implementation used below).