Most of my day is spent staring at the blinking cursor of my text editor. This is true for many people nowadays as most office work happens on the computer, but for programmers – the very same individuals whose creativeness are the building blocks for software – can’t seem to find a workflow that feels right. As a developer I find myself getting frustrated every time that I have to reach across my desk for a mouse, switch to a separate application to look up some documentation, or drop into a terminal window for some quick bash kung-fu. I am a firm believer of using the proper tool for the job, but I have been writing code for over ten years now and have yet to find something that fits the purpose.

Most web and application developers that I know are using proficient in many text editors. The editor that they are using is either a result of the product that they are working on, or past experience using a particular piece of technology (extension, script, plugin, etc) that makes the daily grind a little better. I rarely find a developer who doesn’t have a problem with some facet of the text editor that they are using, and many of which feel that they are stuck for one reason or another with a particular editor because of the feature set it offers.

One thing that seems to be a common theme among these editors is that they sit somewhere between a simple text editor, providing only basic functionality of text formatting, and a full-blown suite of tools which is offered by enterprise packages such as Microsoft’s Visual Studio which costs thousands of dollars and only works on the Windows platform. Each has its specific use case, and I would never suggest creating a Visual Studio project file to edit a README file using the Markdown syntax, but every time that I have the opportunity to use Visual Studio I always walk away feeling let down the next time I drop into Emacs.

A key feature that I think is necessary in a development environment is the ability for the software package to support live documentation. This means that I want to be able pull up a quick blurb about a particular API call that I am about to make, either be it in a standard library that ships with the language of my choice, or the application project that I am working on. The discoverability of documentation needs to be in depth, but not something which clutters my code window.

The editor software needs to be able to be extended on a per project basis. There are often cases where a particular set of tools is necessary for one web project, let’s say something like CodeIgniter which uses the Sparks package management system, and another application that is written with Ruby on Rails and using the RubyGems system for extensions. And it is not merely easy just to say that all PHP applications will use the mode for PHP, and all the Rails projects will use the mode for Ruby, because often there is a frontend component which shares context between the two and is written in a language such as JavaScript (or more recently, Clojure).

Testing each project now becomes an absolute pain in the ass. I may need to manage the version of Ruby that I am running, or perhaps bounce the Apache instances so that my new configuration is picked up, or even worse the web application needs to be executed from a browser, I need to tail a log file, and pray that the browser debugging software is updated. That’s way too many context switches.

I believe that there can be a much better way of handling the day to day workflow of software development. There is a simple solution to this problem that seems to have been overlooked with fancy editors designed to be visually pleasing on the Mac. What do you think your ideal development environment would be? All developers hate writing documentation, but it is the first that we reach for when we want to understand how to work with a library or call a standard API. We cry out aloud when our text editor doesn’t index the code that I am writing and provide autocomplete. And we bitch when extending the editor becomes a chore which sometimes rivals the problems we’re trying to solve.

There is a better way to handle this.

I was browsing my Google Reader news feed this morning and came across article that was available up on the Life Hacker blog. For those of you that do not subscribe to the hacker mentality, this blog is up and available for those of us looking to learn the shortcuts in life, and tinker a little bit with our daily routine to optimize the hell out of it.

The Stupid Things You Do in the Kitchen (and How to Fix Them) is a neat article which explains some of the top things that amateur chefs, and even those of us just looking to make some tasty morsels, tend to make without realizing it. I know that I’ve made at least a few of these (and continue to on occasion) mistakes in the past. If you’re interested in raising your cooking skill up a notch then this is a must read.

About a week or so ago I came across a blog post which redirected me to the Mozilla’s BrowserQuest project. The free multiplayer game, which is completely built with web technologies, was introduced as a demonstration of what we can expect to see in the upcoming years for web-centric game development. BrowserQuest was developed using a mixture of HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript (client and server) to create a multiplayer game that can be experienced wholly through an up-to-date web browser.

The first few days that  I was trying to play the game Mozilla’s servers must have been swamped. I was unable to actually get beyond the initial screen, but thankfully Mozilla posted the source code for both the client and server, completely written in Javascript and available on Github, so I was able to satisfy my technology curiosities. The past few years with the introduction of more powerful, freely available, open source Javascript engines such as Mozilla’s own SpiderMonkey and Google’s V8, have paved the way for a language which is interoperable with C/C++ to be easily embeddable and integrated with existing application systems. Node.js was made available to quickly build scalable event-driven servers that can power whole service-oriented backends, and this is precisely the same technology used in BrowserQuest.

This brings me back to my roots. When I was younger what brought me into the realm of programming was both web development, and text-based roleplaying games. Along with a few friends I ran what is commonly referred to as a MUD, or Multi-User Dungeon, a small application which ran on a remote machine allowing players to connect over the Internet. This game was completely driven by text; movement, combat, and storytelling were all expressed with text, sometimes an emphasis using bold and italic font styles, by the time that I got to the game coloring was available as well, but the game itself was completely driven by imagination.

I can see myself getting back involved in a community developing a game that is available for players to connect to, quest with their friends, and being there to generally provide an escape, an alternative, to the high-priced, resource demanding, massive multiplayer games that exist such as Star Wars and World of Warcraft. I can’t wait to see what the development community comes up with, and I hope that I find the time to participate in what I believe to be the reemerging platform that will hopefully spark a new generation of programmers willing to tinker, hack, and make some awesome art.

After a few years of iPhone ownership I made the mistake that has become signature of clumsy Apple owners as of late. The seemingly innocent mishap where your phone slides out of your hands and contacts with a surface, creating a spider-like hairlike crack across the glass screen, but rendering your phone still usable until you poney up the benjamins to replace the screen. At the point that this happened my phone was already two years old, I was eligible for another contract extension, but I refused to sign my life away to the behemoth that is AT&T for another two years. I got a really good deal on an Android phone, off contract, so I went down that route and for the first few months fought many battles that, I thought, were eventually won.

Most smart phones nowadays have battery problems. Even the brand new iPhone is plagued with issues regarding the battery life draining away that Apple is trying to solve with software patches. But I feel that because of the large differences in software stacks that are shipped with phones it is much harder for Google, and the device manufacturers, to solve these problems across the board. Every single Android device that I have ever seen has some kind of battery issue. Luckily this is solved quite well with the JuiceDefender application that is available from the market place.

Another issue that I’ve run into is that some of these standard, “best of the breed” Google applications, just plain old fucking suck. There are at least three different mapping applications that shipped with my phone that I can count. This may be a result of the bundled software that HTC installed, but from what I’ve been able to ascertain Google owns at least two of them. What the hell is the difference between Locations and Maps? I have never had an instance when I wanted a map where I did not want to find the fucking location of a business and get walking, subway or driving directions.

My phone came with a Navigation application that Google maintains. In my opinion this has to be the best navigation software that ships standard with a phone that I have ever seen. When it works it is much more accurate than any GPS navigation unit that I have ever owned. The turn by turn directions are almost aways spot on, and the features that come out of the box work as advertised. There is one catch. Often it can take five to ten minutes to pick up a signal with the GPS satellite, and by that time you’ve probably turned around several times because you lost your fucking way. Often rebooting the phone and launching the application again will solve this problem.

By far my largest complaint is the fact that Google can’t seem to hire proper employees that can actually design a framework to make these generic applications flow. It feels like the workflow of the applications were all thrown together without any foresight into the context of where I may have been before it launched. The speed of launching new applications is generally slower than the iPhone counterpart, and responsiveness of the system needs to be beefed up. My phone is by far not a slug, but why am I waiting for Google’s own applications to chug along, hang, and finally open up another application because the mapping application doesn’t actually incorporate the navigation software?

Google needs to work on the cohesiveness of the user experience across the whole system. The software is top notch. I love being able to synchronize my contacts, calendar, and e-mail between all of my Google services seamlessly. But I can’t turn a blind eye to the fact that someone over there doesn’t seem to understand that we need to have synergy between the workflow and the interface. The fact that this doesn’t exist and the software is plain old fucking slow is making me want to go back to Apple.

I purchased a screen replacement for my iPhone 3GS and plan on spending some time this week to bring it back to working order. I think my experiment with Android is done for now. You can release hundreds of phones a year with your software, get thousands of activations every day, but if you can’t make the software and the hardware work seamlessly what is the fucking point?

Many of us “formally trained” developers tend to put an engineering mindset to many of the problems in our life, and this is exactly what I did when I took a look back on my own personal productivity issues. I was beginning to notice that much of my day was filled with distractions. Many of them are valid, but a good chunk of them could be managed much, much better. If you’re productivity is anything like mine it comes in spurts: the beginning of the day you’re cruising with two or three cups of coffee in you, and about an hour before lunchtime everything starts to slow down only to pick up at around 3:45pm. For the next two and a half hours you actually get some work done.

I’ve always had a problem with distractions during work. Many people tend to have the problem where they’ll answer personal e-mails, cruise around on Facebook, or tap away on their phone. I do all of that, but it never became a problem where I had reassess my strategy of getting shit done at work. I am a news junkie. And just like any other junkie, my habit can become compulsive and often lead to me wasting a lot of time on lurking. When you give them a medium that literally includes live news feeds from all around the world, well, I make a habit of spending my time reading. Reading. And reading. It could be about sports, politics, jubilation, world turmoil or even the fall (and eventual rise) of orange juice options.

At the time of this writing it is roughly four thirty in the morning and I am cruising news websites because I can’t sleep. But during the hours of work this can absolutely become a problem. One of the ways that I have been able to manage it is by spending a good chunk of time in the morning (and evening) on the bus ride reading news digitally. This gives me my fix for the day and doesn’t affect work productivity. Being of the engineering mindset I’m always looking for that optimum solution for being productive at work. How do you manage your action items? Do you plan your day out on paper, use colored post-it notes based on priority, an old fashioned to-do list, or are you the type of person that doesn’t need a mechanism to get shit done?

For me I’d definitely be in favor of software that allowed me to track to-do items across multiple environments (Windows, iPad, Android, Mac) and have found that Google’s Task API gives me the ability to do this seamlessly. But I haven’t yet found a proper front-end that is clean and intuitive to use. On the Mac side the Things software has been around for awhile, but charges for the application usage on multiple platforms. They seem to have solved the issue elegantly, but I am also looking for integration with my Google services which doesn’t seem to be there yet. And I also have that pesky Windows and Android to think about. Not to mention it is just damn expensive.

Maybe the answer is that there isn’t anything yet that’ll let me organize my priorities digitally, but I have a hard time believing that. What are your experiences?