Started with FontLab around 2003. Nowadays, my primary tool for development is Glyphs. It’s very easy to use, it’s pretty quick to learn how to use it, and it has quite an active forum/community open to help. Also, you can find plenty of tutorial around. Production wise, apart Glyphs, I use OTMaster quite a lot, fontmake and fonttools (these two are command line tools). VTT (Visual TrueType) for hinting.

My first experiments with fonts were pure trash, bad under many respects. Either super modular and stiff, or completely unaware of letterform construction (how the weight distribution works, proportions, etc.). Most useful thing for myself is to have a brief in mind and to give a sense to the shapes I draw.

I would study letterform, trying to reverse-engineer the design, looking at patterns within each letter but also among the whole alphabet. For example, how the shape of the curves is implemented across the glyph set (if you go for squarish curves, you would expect to get a similar personality wherever you have a curve).Feel free to drop me a line if you need more advice. There are also few good books that can help to focus on the important bits of letterforms construction.