What are the tools of the trade that you will never see in a product requirements document or feature request from an investor or client?
Clients often just expect that certain things are taken care of when building a web site. These tools of the trade are important - they are ubiquitous across systems, and often we use the cheaper tools to start with and then switch over (re-tool) during the course of business growth. Over the course of the next few posts, I'm going to briefly develop what I think are the Top 5 tools of the trade for a software engineer working on a website, from the point of the view that your customers will never ask for them, but they are almost always required and even assumed.
I'm going to try to consider this in a language-neutral way and stick with general principles or ideas. Stay tuned!