It’s already 2013, time to sum up somehow the last year. 2012 was exciting, filled with many interesting projects.

To summarize my tech life in 2012, I honor now my personal “Top-Technologies of 2012”. I work at the moment as Unix systems engineer, most of the tools helped me a lot in my daily job.

• System Administration: fabric
  My tool of the year. With fabric you can easily script your SSH sessions in Python. Nothing less and a lot more. You can also use fabric as library for your own Python app.
• Development: Regular Expressions
  Sure Regex are old, but they are still awesome. There is just so much stuff which wants to get parsed in UNIX and with Python it’s even more fun. It has its advantages to text.split()[i] and cut -f2 | grep -v foo, etc.
• Monitoring: Graphite
  Graphing as easy as it should be. There are many monitoring solutions available, but I prefer to invest my time in collecting high quality metrics and not in dealing with the administration and bugs of the existing fancy monitoring solutions.

Newcomer of the year:

• ipython-notebook: I only discovered this new genius tool in December, but it has the potential to become my “Tool of the year 2013”. For my daily job I use of course a lot of terminals, but also some simple text editors like gedit, where I can document the outputs or results of some critical shell activities, just by copy&paste. And somehow I think ipython-notebook fits perfect into this workflow. Need to spent more time with this tool.
• vagrant: Easy cheap disposable virtual environments. Also quite new to me, but I like it so far. You can also see it as nice wrapper for the the Virtualbox CLI, which is maybe already a killer feature.