Laptop setup

While you are welcome to customize your laptop, here are some tools that have worked for others on the engineering team!

ChromeDriver for headless website testing
chruby for managing Ruby versions.
Cloud Foundry CLI for command line access to 18F's Cloud Foundry-based application platform
Caulking checks for many common types of API tokens and other sensitive information before you commit
GitHub Desktop for setting up your SSH keys automatically
Homebrew for managing operating system libraries
Homebrew Cask for quickly installing Mac apps from the command line
Homebrew Services so you can easily stop, start, and restart services
gh (official) or hub (unofficial) GitHub-maintained CLI tools for interacting with the GitHub API
nvm for managing Node.js versions if you do not have Node.js already installed (Includes latest Node.js and NPM, for running apps and installing JavaScript packages)
pyenv for managing Python versions if you do not have Python already installed (includes the latest 3.x Python)
ruby-install for installing different versions of Ruby
Slack for communicating with your team
The Silver Searcher for finding things in files
Virtualenv for creating isolated Python environments (via pyenv if it is installed)
Virtualenvwrapper for extending Virtualenv (via pyenv if it is installed)
Zsh as your shell

Licensed software

Docker for all your containerization needs

The docker daemon and docker CLI tools are available on a free license.

Docker Desktop requires a paid license. Ask in 18F only, #admins-docker in Slack to get a license.

Other customizations

Atom - GitHub's open source text editor
Exuberant Ctags for indexing files for vim tab completion
Firefox for testing your website on a browser other than Chrome
iTerm2 - an awesome replacement for the OS X Terminal
reattach-to-user-namespace to allow copy and paste from Tmux
Sublime Text 3 for coding all the things
Tmux for saving project state and switching between projects
Vim for those who prefer the command line
VSCode - Microsoft's open source text editor

These suggestions were culled from the deprecated (as of October 2020) laptop script. If you are looking for references on how to build personal dotfiles, that repo may be of use.