tools | Tech Blog by New Leaf Digital

Oct 30 '11 7:42pm

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Great list of new dev tools from Smashing Magazine

Here's a really superb list of "coding tools and javascript libraries for web developers" from Smashing Magazine. Some of the ones I'll be playing with in the next few days:

Tilt, Firefox DOM inspection in 3D.
Money.js, an open source API and JS library for currency exchange rates (the code on this will also be good for improving my Node.js techniques)
Bootstrap development toolkit
IE VMs - might cover more versions of the evil browser than the VirtualBox I use now.
a bunch of remote debuggers for mobile, haven't tried them yet
Less App - I've been using this one for a long time
Has.js - test your JS environment for available constructs.

and a whole bunch of others. After reading that post, I also added Smashing Magazine to my RSS reader.

Jul 20 '10 12:09am

Pseudo-Best Practices and Tool Creep

Someone wrote to me recently asking if I could help them set up a Drupal development environment for an outsourced dev team. I don't have time and declined the job, but continued a brief correspondence about the requested project requirements, which I thought were interesting:.

The requirements included (each a full installation of a 3rd party software package):

Issue Tracking, Wiki, Forum
Git repository
Git repo server
Git access control
Hudson (Continuous Integration)
Selenium
SimpleTest
JMeter
Capistrano
Drupal Mercury (includes EC2, Varnish)
Image resizing software
rsync

Whoa.

This is the list of tools that you'll find by googling "best practices development environment" or something like that. But it's massive tool creep. Several problems I see here:

Toolsets need to grow organically. Dumping 10 enormous tools on a brand new team (outsourced/remote/global, let alone in the same office) is like throwing a 1000 page HR Handbook on a new employee's desk.
Most of these can be [ironically] outsourced to 3rd party services. There are several excellent Git hosters for example; there's no need to host a repo yourself (unless you have some crazy security requirements).
Tons of redundancy. Both SimpleTest and Selenium can do client-side unit testing. SimpleTest also does server-side; ditch Selenium.
Each of these tools requires maintenance, upgrades, TLC. The team is hired to develop a product, not maintain other companies' software, why not focus on the essentials?
Capistrano is great. I suggested they use Webistrano, however, and write a 5-line Ruby recipe that tells Drush to run SimpleTest before deploying. No need for Hudson anymore.
Issue Tracking, Wiki, and Forum? I worked on a team with Jira and Basecamp and that was more than enough for critical details to get lost. "Did you see my message from last week?" - "Which tool did you put it in?" - "I think Basecamp, but the specs are in Jira, and the wireframes in DropBox, and the timesheet in Google Docs" ... recipe for confusion.
This is a Drupal project. I asked several of the best Drupal developers I know if they've heard of Hudson; they hadn't. (I only have because I worked near a Java team that demo'd it for me. I didn't think it would be helpful for my workflow.) Having a list of tools like this on the job description for developers is likely to be a turnoff. Again, focus on essentials.

So I wish this project all the best. But I think they'd be much better off starting with some simple, well-known tools: Drush, SimpleTest, Webistrano OR Aegir (not both), Basecamp OR Jira OR Atrium. Better to over-use one really good tool than underuse half a dozen tools, in my opinion.

Thoughts, comments, rebuttals?