I was curious how often other software developers reevaluated their development environments and tools. I used to work at a large corporation with rigid toolsets that everyone hated, but could do nothing about. So nobody ever really updated their development environments because we couldn’t in that environment.
Now that I’m in my own start-up I find I can spend endless time evaluating new tools and development environments, but that I really shouldn’t and can’t afford to. I’ve committed to spending 1 day a month looking at new development tools and trying them out to see if it is worth switching.
How often do you try out new IDE’s, editors, bug tacking tools, debuggers? Or update to newer versions of your own?
I only update unless I’m really missing out on a certain piece of functionality, or realize that NOT using one tool instead of another leads to more tasks taking longer/being less efficient.