I have, lots of times. For example, the first time I touched ruby (on rails). I felt I had it all, I looked forward to finding a ne

w rails related job and living happily ever after.

Well, that would have been wrong on so many levels. Rails is not the solution, just a different problem. And don’t get me wrong, I still believe rails is great and you should definitely give it a spin. However there is a little caveat here, I did not know what problems rails was solving.

Yes, I had some experience in web development but I wasn’t experienced. Had I gotten into rails shit would have hit the fan. Why? Because I would have left the .NET world and I wouldn’t have learned all the wonderful lessons that it has to offer.

What I am trying to say is that every tool that out there is a solution to a problem (or a set of problems) and you will be a fool for using one it if you do not know exactly what problem it’s solving.

You will surely not need to implement Mongo DB if you haven’t faced the limitations of a relational database. You will most probably misuse the dependency injection technique if you don’t understand what coupling is. And you shouldn’t use Sass if you can’t write proper CSS.

There are lots of solutions out there, great tools developed by great minds, that can save you a lot of time.

But there are no short-cuts in life, you have to go the long way.  If you have not faced and do not understand the problem, a tool won’t help you. You’ll just continue struggling with the same thing on a whole new level.

In the end I would like to mention that I am no guru, I am looking forward to the day I say “okay, nothing more to learn here, let’s go rails”, however there is still a lot more I need to achieve.

You all know this guy preaching all over the world that he has found the best IDE. I’ve been this guy and most probably you’ve been this guy as well. By the way, I hate this guy.

And lets say I am willing to listen to this guy, he’d argue all night long how his is the IDE a human can be most productive with, and it can do this and it can do that. How his tool makes the most common actions a breeze and intuitively guides him trough his life.

And while this peace of mind and joy with your surroundings is important, I’d argue it is not the most important thing. Rather than having these clever bots think of a way for me to be more productive I want to be the one defining my own experience.

The more important thing is that you are able to effectively identify the actions that slow you down. Once you do it’s quite easy to find a solution be it a shortcut or a snippet, or even a plug-in. Given that most of the tools out there give you enough flexibility for customization the debate is over.

I personally use Visual Studio 2010 flavoured with NuGet, an IronRuby console for playing around with the framework classes, a couple of highly customized command plug-ins, and tons of extra short-cuts.

The best IDE is by far the customized one.

A lot of people think they are being objective when choosing and IDE, they are not. All of us are subjective when it comes to tools. It is most likely a reflection of our personalities. And in the end, it doesn’t really matter. So please, find yourself something that suits you and stop blabbering.

Recently I have stumbled upon some interesting findings about the nature of the silly creature called programmer. I guess the time has come to share them.

While this blog is programming oriented you will not find too many code snippets or clever tricks for your <put-editor-of-choice-here> and <put-language-of-choice-here>.

Rest assured you shall not find any LOL programmer fail pictures here, just me making sense of the world.