If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants. - Isaac Newton
Sites of well-known brands invest in allot to have their brands stand out, and they present a better experience to users.
There are many icon frameworks out there, and everyone has his favourite, though I find these following easy to customise and a bit unique
I like plain and clean backgrounds, You might have noticed already by visiting this blog, but sometimes they are boring, this is where background pattern become handy.
These are a lot helpful when you're designing and testing in the browser. Muzil always through design trends to my face when ever I open the browser this becomes handy and keeps me update.
I started my development career with sublime text as the main code editor, and I loved it so much because it was fast, and it could run seemly on my low powered MacBook Air. As I become more obsessed with code refactoring PhpStorm and WebStorm become very handy, and I dropped sublime, I only use it when editing a single file.
Here is my setup and IDE of choice:-