@TheKeyboard Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.

For those who remember how I was an editor waffler will remember that I play around with Komodo from time to time, and decided to get back into using it again. There are alpha 5.0 versions available so I downloaded one and tried it out. Seems to be less resource hungry than previous versions (as in it doesn’t cause my fan in my MacBook to start up every time I open Komodo). Now, since I know a few people at Activestate I emailed Jeff Griffiths to ask him a few questions. He responded by hacking together something very quickly for adding code intelligence for CakePHP to your views. If you’re a Komodo user (or are interested in trying out Komodo), try it out and let Jeff know how it’s working out.

I’m bored.

There, I said it. I think it’s probably one of my worst character flaws in that I get disinterested in long-running projects that I am working on quite easily. Somehow, CakePHP continues to grab my interest so maybe I’m getting better. But I can’t escape that voice I hear in my head (I mean, the one that cuts through all the other voices) that says “you MUST be working on the latest and the greatest, otherwise you’re wasting your time”.

Such is the peril when you work for a small company, and you’re the only developer on a project. I should’ve stuck with my guns and built the damn thing on CakePHP instead of CodeIgniter. Bah! Anyhow, here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately:

• Lots of good input on features for my ‘cake deploy’ idea. I got a good suggestion via Twitter to take a look at what Symfony is doing in this regard, so maybe they can give me some ideas on a solid implementation.
• I have an extreme alpha version of Rallyhat working, and are now trying to get the look-and-feel stuff taking care of. Found a colourscheme I like. Thank you kuler
• Gave up on the Django-on-Google-App-Engine idea because I just couldn’t get the datastore stuff to work properly. Screw it, I’ll go back to my straight Django app. I am contemplating running it off of Amazon EC2, but I wonder how much work that is to do. If any of my readers have any tips on making this work, let me know.
• 3 weeks straight of using MacVim as my main IDE! No complaints, and I broke out Komodo the other day just for the XDebug stuff. Yes, I know you can use xdebug inside vim but the implementation I saw lacks the variable introspection features that Komodo gives you.
• Some time in the next day or two, a beta release for CakePHP 1.2 is coming out. This is *very* exciting news. After that, 1.2RC1 is around the corner. If I wasn’t so damn busy working on the new and shiny things, I might actually contribute more than that one small patch for console work. Which other people ended up extending anyway. Bah
• I took a look at Seaside, a web application framework that uses Smalltalk and found out that there is no templating for doing the HTML. Huh? You create all the HTML programatically and then style it using CSS. Not too designer friendly, but they do give an explanation about why it is this way.. How delightfully sadistic! And yet, strangely appealing…
• I need to find a way to convince my employer that attending conferences provides value to the company, and not just me. Even though I only go to conferences where I speak. Unless I have some really generous readers willing to underwrite me to go.
• I read something recently on the idea of working remotely but with some other freelance tech types as a way to at least get some social contact. Don’t know how well that would work out here in Milton, but maybe it’s worth sending some feelers out.

Okay, back to refactoring some code for work…

In a post earlier this week I had talked about the fact that I have turned into an “editor waffler”, paralyzed with fear that I couldn’t decide on what editor to use for my day-to-day use. I had promised that by the end of the week I would reveal what editor I’ve decided on using. But before I talk about that, I wanted to talk some more about my thoughts on why I can’t decide.

I had prepared a really long blog post to answer this question but I started rambling and I deleted it all. It comes down to a fear of freedom. That’s right, a fear of freedom. I have enlightened employers who don’t care what tools I use as long as I get the job done. I’m grateful for that, so I am constantly looking for tools that meet my requirements from project to project. I think I’ve settled on the collection of tools that are working for me on a daily basis. Thanks to Marc Grabanski for his Arsenal of Web Development Tools post for reminding me that it’s about tools that you don’t fight with that help you get the job done.

Here’s my personal web development stack:

• TextMate — built in SVN integration, syntax highlighting for all sorts of common web langauges *and* I found a plugin that highlights what files in the file drawer are under version control
• Terminal — still a CLI guy for a lot of tasks, especially for code generation
• Firefox with Firebug — if there was something as good for Safari I’d use it instead
• CocoaMySQL — sometimes I use the CLI client, but CocoaMySQL is the tool I use most of the time for MySQL work. I need to find one that I like as much for Postgres
• CSSEdit — I was so impressed at how it helped this CSS and layout n00b fix a problem, I paid for a copy

Those 5 tools are the ones I find myself using consistently, day-in and day-out. But that’s not to say I don’t use other things as well. I use vim for quick editing of system-level files and for editing on various remote servers. I do use Komodo when I really need to do some deep debugging, like I had to do a few weeks ago to try and figure out why an upgrade to the latest version of Code Igniter was failing for a work project (they broke their Active Record implementation when dealing with Postgres for whatever reason, please prove me wrong if that’s not true) and it helped me narrow down the problem a lot faster.

By being an “editor waffler” I have learned enough about a variety of tools that I feel like they are all part of my toolkit. It’s like having a large number of tools and making sure that you use the right one for the job. Okay, enough angst from for now on my choice of editors.

• Why the heck can’t I find any info on reusable views in Code Ignitor so I can quit duplicating code I see all over the place?
• Found a cool article on using debugging PHP using XDebug in vim. Sometimes Komodo gets resource hungry and a quick drop into vim usually makes me feel better.
• Man, how much time should someone spend refactoring code they’ve inherited? Is it really true that people think everyone else’s code is ugly and theirs is a paragon a beauty?
• Working on the script for a podcast entitled ‘Coding Standards Only Matter When Things Go Wrong’
• Trying to figure out if I can fit in an opportunity to teach some online courses into my current employment
• Rallyhat (my sporting road trip planning site) is actually in the ‘designing screens on paper’ stage. Maybe I will scan some notes for showing people in another post
• Jeff Griffiths from ActiveState (Hi Jeff!) emailed me to ask me to provide some feedback on using CakePHP with Komodo. If anyone else is building CakePHP apps with Komodo, let me know how you’re making out.