Apr
Or at least my sanity. Friday afternoon, after several hours of intense development, my HP lappy decided to take a bow and go to sleep indefinitely. After an hour of pleading it to power back on, I gave up and moved to outfit my desktop as a replacement development platform.
I downloaded and installed the latest Windows builds of Apache, PHP and MySql, and within 15 minutes I had a fully operational development server without spending a dime. All that was missing was checking out our latest SVN repository revision (which unfurtunately was without the lost hours of today’s development effort), and then it hit me how I’ve been taking open-source for granted. What I’ve just been able to do - rebuild an identical development machine (minus some lost code) in minimum effort and zero cost, allowing me to get to work until my laptop gets fixed, is no small feat.
In honor of this small eye-opener, I give you some personal favorites:
Open Source Windows - Tons of great open-source software for windows.
Web development - Apache Server, PHP, MySQL, subversion, phpMyAdmin, Zend Framework, jQuery, Firebug
Now, if someone would just get that Windows thing open-sourced…
