I develop in a virtual machine that mimics my production server(s). This reduces the amount of deployment surprises when pushing to staging. I use 1 dev vm pe

I develop in a virtual machine that mimics my production server(s). This reduces the amount of deployment surprises when pushing to staging. I use 1 dev vm per project. For version control I use git. For git hosting i use github. Absolutely test locally, and then test in staging and production. All three of the environments are similar. For editing i use vim. My setup is not a silver bullet, someone could be using a completely different setup (dev server, emacs, hg) and be just as fast as me. It's not really the tools that make my setup so great, it's the ideas behind them.