So, I have a few questions for the lazyweb (aka my awesome readers). I’m hoping they can point me in the right direction.:

• At work, my boss is wondering if there is a way for us to determine *ahead* of time if queries being generated by our web service are going to really churn the database and lock things up. Since the queries are very dynamic, I can only do so much in the caching department. Application is PHP-based, built using Code Igniter
• Inspired by my friend Joel feel free to share your essential VIM plugins. Mine are netrw, autoclose, 0scan, matchit, paster (I use it all the time at work), surround, taglist, vcscommand (although I have started using a git plugin that I can’t find the download page for, and then a bunch of syntax highlighting plugins for Django, Git, PHP (can’t remember which one), Python (can’t remember which one) and Xquery.

Let me know via the comments what you know or find out. Thanks and enjoy the Easter / Passover break!

Book Review On The Run
On the recommendation of someone I follow on Twitter I ordered a copy of “Beautiful Architecture”, a collection of essays and articles published by O’Reilly and edited by Diomidis Spinellis & George Gousios. It’s all about software architecture and so far it’s been an awesome read. For anyone who’s ever been in a position to have a say about not just WHAT they are building but HOW they build it, it’s a great read. I’m about halfway through.

Frameworks expand to fill available space
I was thinking about this the other day. All frameworks start out being lightweight, unless your original design calls for you to be full-stack and bundle everything including a small web server for testing. Then, as the project matures you keep adding things to it and before you know it you are just as big and close to being full-stack as everyone else. So to those that call certain frameworks bloated, reconsider your position and take into account what YOU add to an application built with that framework that is not already in there.

7 Habits for Effective Text Editing 2.0
Even if you don’t use the One True Editor, check out this video with the creator of Vim as he talks about being more efficient when working with text. The strategies he talks about work with ANY editor / IDE and that’s really the point.

Rails and Merb merge

Much to surprise of many, egos have been pushed aside and Rails and Merb are merging to create Rails 3. It’s not very often I read something online and unleash a string of astonished obscenities, but this announcement absolutely stunned me.

If I ever went back into the land of Ruby again, Merb was going to be the framework I was going to use. But since I’m not going that way, it’s really a moot point. Rails can only get better by not only integrating stuff from Merb into it but also taking to heart the modular nature of Merb itself.

Perhaps this is yet another watershed moment in the evolution of frameworks. As much as I am a full-stack guy, I am seeing the advantage to having a framework that has a very tight core, and lots of modules that you can add-on to it. Django has this to a certain extent, but it also has a lot in the core.

Alternate Workflows

I’ve been spending time at work trying to figure out workflows that fit in with my development style. I found this very innovative web-focused workflow that uses Git. The thing that I find intriguing is that it allows you to make edits on the production side, and those changes get propagated to where they need to go. Even though I think that doing edits on the production side of things is usually a Very Bad Idea, but that might be a product of my experience with one-way deployment of code from dev->staging->production.

Master your Editor

Now that my waffling is over and I only use MacVim as my primary editor, I am now embarking on the journey from beginning user to vim power user. Thanks to posts like this one from a series on Vim plugins you should know about, I can customize my programming environment to be the way *I* want. No matter what editor you use, take the time to learn it’s features and you will surely discover ways to become more productive.

Design your site from front to back

Ever tried to design a site based off a text description from the client / boss / whatever? You are doomed to failure. Instead, I have started insisting on taking things in the other direction and designing from front to back. Tools like Balsamiq Mockups are indispensable to make this happen. In truth the tool doesn’t matter. What matters is that you have a way to draw rough designs for your site and then build it from the interface on back. For a guy who has very little design talent, this makes total sense to me. I have two side projects that currently exist ONLY as interface sketches. And I think that is a good thing.

Any way, that’s it for now. Have a good holiday season I will be posting again next week with the next installment in my “refactoring with CakePHP” series, this time about the rearranging of business logic and display logic.

• Komodo 5 is out. If you’ve been looking for an IDE that lets you work with multiple languages, do not waste any more time looking. Go and check it out. (Disclaimer: I am in Activestate’s good books and received a free upgrade to Komodo 5). I have been playing with it (currently I use a different IDE because I am a masochist) but I do use it when I need to break out a debugger for some nasty code. It was weird using Komodo and finding my fingers trying to type all the keystrokes that vim uses
• The Side Project For Money That Will Not Die has really pushed my coding skills forwards by reinforcing the notion to embrace the conventions of the framework your application has been built with. Nothing sharpens the skills up like taking old code and figuring out how to duplicate the functionality under the constraints of a different system. While it is an exercise in coding masochism, I highly recommend everyone doing it at least once.
• Giles Bowkett is a guy you should pay attention to. Sure, he’s a Ruby guy but he’s *very* different from the rest of the Ruby community. Follow his blog and follow him on Twitter too.
• Returning to IDE’s for a second, if you do settle on an editor for your day-to-day use (Komodo, stop poking me in the ribs! Vim is laughing at me now) please, PLEASE, learn what you need to learn to master it. Otherwise you end up like me: typing :V, scrolling down and typing Y in Komodo, then wondering why nothing got copied. Yes, I know there are vim keybindings for it but muscle memory is a very nasty thing.
• It’s all over but the shouting: \ has been chosen as the new separator / indicator for namespaces in PHP 5.3+. My own opinion on this doesn’t really matter, I’m just glad that they have decided.
• Something I saw a few weeks ago in a screencast of a talk that Obie Fernandez gave about the proper way to about being a consultant has totally stuck with me: do exceptional work. Three simple words that a lot of people should pay attention to no matter the environment they happen to be working in. Of course, easier said than done.
• Selenium + PHPUnit + CodeIgniter is helpful, but really, really slow.
• PHPUnit + CodeIgniter is good because I am tired of fixing bugs that would’ve been caught if I had written tests.

Since I make a little bit of money every month in advertising off this blog, I thought I’d put some of this money to good use. I’ve been trying very hard to use vim as my editor for day-to-day use. Previously, amidst lots of waffling, I had settled on TextMate for my day-to-day work. Awesome editor, nice and lightweight and full of the cool features I needed. There were two features that were stopping me from totally switching over.

First one was Cmd-T inside a project, which allows you to search through your project doing a fuzzy search for files that match your search string. Awesome, awesome feature. Cuts down on the browsing using the project drawer that I tended to do. That particular hurdle has been fixed thanks to Jamis Buck (of Capistrano and 37 Signals) through his FuzzyFinderTextmate plugin. It’s extends the fuzzyfinder.vim plugin with a little bit of Ruby. Does the trick, but you have to do a little jiggering to get it to recognize new files. An argument for another day I guess.

The second one is the also-awesome ‘Find In Project’ feature in Textmate, which searches through all your files looking for matches for the string (or regex if you’re up to it) inside those files, then providing you with a list of files that you can open. I’m wanting functionality similar to how the fuzzyfindertextmate plugin referenced above works, but for searching inside files.

I am aware of how :vimgrep and :grep work (thanks to those who pointed it out), but I do not like how the quickfix window works, as I want a dropdown list of the files that contain what was found so I can open them. Again, very similar as to how the FuzzyFinderTextmate plugin works.

So, I am offering $100 of my own ill-gotten advertising revenue (payable via PayPal) to the person who comes up with the solution I like the best that actually works. If you don’t want the money, I can donate it to the charity of your choice as long as they will take PayPal as well.

I know *someone* out there can figure this out. I’ll give you until American Thanksgiving to come up with a solution. Please post your suggestions in the comments, but please realize that all comments are moderated and off-topic ones will definitely be sent to /dev/null

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.

webslinginfool
or try pida
which _is_ what you wanted no?

Chris Hartjes
pida?

webslinginfool
*sigh*

Chris Hartjes
not really

webslinginfool

http://pida.co.uk/files/screenshots/pida_0-5-2_17.png

Chris Hartjes
if I want that, I can go with Textmate

webslinginfool
true
very true
actually , why dont you use textmate?

Chris Hartjes
I do use it
but you get me looking at that vim stuff

webslinginfool
ahh
a man of weak faith
tsk
tsk
tsk

Chris Hartjes
very weak when it comes to editors

webslinginfool
wait, let me halt construction of your monument
i've never met anyone like you actually

Chris Hartjes
in what way

webslinginfool
editor waffling

Chris Hartjes
yeah, that's pretty rare
I dunno why I'm like that

webslinginfool
i've never even  heard of it
you should totally add an "editors"
section to your blog and simply detall
your experiences
oh, and make friends with a bishop

Chris Hartjes
fuck
YOU

webslinginfool
because you'll start a holy war!

Kevin is a vim guy, and is always giving me tips (solicited or not) on how to make my vim experience more enjoyable. A lot of what he gives me *is* useful. I probably have a vim setup now that will work okay for me, and I did give vim a two-week audition as my main editor a while back. However, it didn’t have the GUI file drawer / file explorer crutch that I’ve gotten used to. Besides, I think my arguments about why I use each editor are just lame.

• Komodo – got a free license after talking at the Vancover PHP conference last year (please, go to Open Web Vancouver this year so they can get enough money for me to fly business class ), cool editor, nice debugger…but I find it slow and unresponsive at times.
• TextMate – one of the first OS-X apps I ever paid for, nice and snappy, great syntax highlighting…but doesn’t have the tooltip stuff that Komodo does. I did find a cool plugin that shows me what files I’ve modifed in version control right there in the file drawer, but it’s not an IDE like Komodo is
• vim – very powerful, pretty much does everything I need in an editor…but all those damn commands to remember, and where’s my pretty GUI file explorer?!?!

Those are three of the lamest statements I’ve come across in my talking to people about the editor I use. Editors are usually a religious issue amongst developers: you can pry the one they use every day from their cold, dead hands.

So, maybe it’s time to grow up as a developer and stop switching between editors. But can I do it? Yes, I know you’re not used to reading my angst-filled posts about what editor to use. Damnit, why am I so weak on this issue?!?

This post is not intended to become a holy war on what editor to use, I’m just expressing my frustration at my inability to decide what to do here. If I look at it objectively, it’s about what tool I would be the most productive in. The problem is, I can’t figure that out…probably because I keep switching all the damn time.

Is it fear of commitment? Fear that I pick the wrong editor for what I need? I have started branching out into other languages, so my editor needs to support those as well. All three can do it. *sigh*

Komdo vs. TextMate vs. vim. Maybe there is no winner, just a loser. Me.

One of the thing the Pragmatic Programmers said (when not trying to get us to buy their books all the time) is to settle on one editor, whatever one that is, and learn ALL it has to offer because you might be surprised what it can do for you. Flipping back and forth is no way to do that. More like a delaying tactic from someone who doesn’t want to HAVE to pick, maybe?

Well folks, that day has come. I must pick and stick with it for once. I’ll let you guys know at the end of the week what I picked. Go back to making fun of me in the other posts, okay?