Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

zsh - clearly not new, but I recently switched from bash to it. Spelling correction is very cool, and I like the tab completion a lot more.

Rails - again, not new, but I've really enjoyed it. I've built web apps in COBOL (had to at my previous employer), so being able to work with Rails has been a joy in comparison. I actually started playing around with Rails last year, but I never really did anything with it until this year. I like Ruby, although I'm not entirely sure I like it more than Python yet. It's growing on me, though. I like that I can have a basic prototype up and running in basically no time at all. When I was learning it, it was also nice that I only really had to learn one piece at a time. I tried out Django shortly before I began using Rails, being more comfortable with Python, but I felt that the learning curve was a bit steeper with Django.

Google Chrome - I'm not sure if this is the type of response you're after, but Chrome quickly supplanted Safari as my favorite browser. It's faster, the UI is slightly better, and my gripes are few and far between.

Along with that, I'd probably have to add XCode. Extremely well-designed IDE and makes writing Cocoa a breeze.

redis - insanely fast - I've been using for some stuff at Cork'd mongo - very excited by this one, too. not having to write ALTER TABLE statements is pretty great.

CouchDB was probably the most interesting since it had iterative map reduce, but I ended up abandoning it for MongoDB because it was much faster.

The second best is Mako. A month or two ago I switched from using Django for templating to Mako. Depending on the composition of the pages there was a 2-6x speed improvement, the code got significantly cleaner since special tags/filters weren't needed for basic opertions like less-than or modulo. Also, the ease of creating custom tags in Mako made me more willing to create them and drastically reduced code complexity.

The best technology I first used this year was jQuery. As someone who knew ECMAScript extremely well and JavaScript a bit it made me an order of magnitude more productive and made things possible that I would have been too frustrated to complete otherwise. It immediately seemed natural to work with the DOM using set operations. And it has tons of plugins which are just as easy to use. This is one of the best designed libraries I've ever used. I hope using it will act as an introduction to functional programming to people who might have otherwise been scared of it.

F#. I work in a primarily Microsoft-based environment, and I wanted to learn a functional language, so F# is a good choice for me - I can actually put it to use at my "day job".

jQuery. A great javascript library.