A few weeks back I came across a site that can generate all of your GitHub activity into a single chart. Looking at mine, I noticed that I have been fairly consistent in my activity over the past 15 years.

Each year I try to learn a new language, framework or technology. This practice encourages me to continuously learn new skills and be a newbie again. This year, I’ve spent the past few months working on a mobile client for Docket . While the mobile web UI works well enough, I wanted to see if the UX could be smoother with a native application.

I use task lists extensively to organize my life both work and at home. Over the years I’ve used tools like Things.app and Todoist. While I like lots about Todoist there are a few aspects I miss from Things like the ‘evening’ view and task descriptions.

For the past 15 years I’ve been a Mac user. Like many, I loved the best in class hardware, great desktop shell, and the ability to use BSD/*nix tools without having to run virtual machines. When my 2012 Macbook pro was no longer aging gracefully, I started evaluating my options for a new machine. MacOS was no longer as appealing as it once was.

I’ve long kept notes and ideas written down in a variety of text files across my computer. While this ‘worked’ I always found it a bit lacking, but was not willing to commit to a cloud based notes application as I prefer the simplicity and portability of plain text files.

In my daily work, I end up having to ssh into a variety of hosts. Keeping track of which terminal is on which host can become challenging when I have 3 or 4 terminals all at a mysql prompt, or tailing log files. A co-worker of mine came up with a pretty clever solution that I wanted to share. The clever solution involves some bash, and Applescript (as we’re working off of OSX).

With CakePHP 3.0 out the door, I thought it would be good to reflect on the project. CakePHP 3.0 is the longest and largest open source project milestone I’ve ever participated in. At FreshBooks we do retrospectives on large projects as a way to see what went well, and what could have gone better. The goal is to discover things we should keep doing, and what to improve the next time around.

I recently read write code every day by John Resig. I’ve been trying to follow a similar set of ideas for a while now. My rules were less restrictive than John’s were.

I try to keep fairly busy. Between work, being a dad, and working on existing open source projects, I found time to work on two new ones.

Xhgui2

Profiling is a very interesting topic for me. I love spending time sifting through results trying to find ways to make code run faster or use less memory. XHProf is a C-extension created by Facebook.

Making sure your freshly released CakePHP plugin still passes all of its tests can be a bit of a time sink. Setting up Jenkins for small project can be a big job. After I setup Jenkins once or twice, I personally longed for a simple way to get continuous integration with not much work.

In the last article I went over the various static analysis tools I’ve found useful, and how to get them installed. For this installment, I’ll be going over how to use make to run all the tasks, and how to configure all the tools to work with Jenkins.

I’ve recently integrated static analysis tools into both my day job’s and CakePHP’s development process. Setting up static analysis tools is reasonably easy and can help you find problems before you even get to unit tests, or staging sites. They are also the ideal tool to help enforce coding standards, and best practices that can be checked by reading the code.

I’ve been working all day everyday with Monaco for the last 6 years. Monaco is a great typeface, it has a number of really great properties. It has a large x-height, and a large m-width. This make it great typeface at small sizes. While monaco is a perfectly good typeface, I wanted experiment and see if there is another typeface that would be even better.

In a previous post I talked about switching to Vim and how I was using Janus to get a good foundational set of plugins to work with, and make starting with vim less daunting. As I’ve gotten more comfortable with vim, I wanted a simpler way to manage my vim config.

About a month ago, I decided that I would try and switch to Vim as my only editor. I’ve been a pretty hard core Textmate for about 5 years now, and haven’t really had any issues. So why bother switching? My first reason is I spend a ton of time in SSH + terminals.

As you may or may not know CakePHP is transitioning to PHPUnit and with this transition comes a totally new Mock object interface/implementation.

In the past I’ve used a variety of tools to deploy client sites, most often using version control. However, for my blog I’ve always used FTP. Its a pretty old-school approach, and something that I’ve been lacking the time to correct. Last weekend I finally took the plunge and figured out how to get Capistrano to deploy my site.

Errors and error reporting an important part of the development and debugging cycle. In interpreted languages, there are a number of runtime errors that can really help you debug your code. Some languages like python don’t give you a way to make the errors go away, but for better or worse PHP does.