I’m all about putting order to “best of” and “worst of” lists, so why not give some brief props to the tools, plugins, and utilities that make life on Rails a wonderous thing to behold?
5. Phusion Passenger. OK, this would probably be first on the list, but it’s already been around so long that I think it’s officially time to start taking it for granted. But before we completely take it for granted, would anyone care to take a moment to remember what life was like in a world of round-robin balanced Mongrels web servers? You wouldn’t? Yah, me neither. But no matter how I try, I cannot expunge memories of repeatedly waking up to the site alarm at 7am to discover somebody had jammed up all the Mongrels with their stinking store update and now I’ve got to figure out some way to get them to stop.
4. jQuery / jRails. This probably deserves to score higher, as the difference between jQuery and Prototype is comparable to the difference between Rails and PHP. But since it’s not really Rails-specific, I’m going to slot it at four and give major props to John Resig for being such an attentive and meticulous creator. Without jQuery and jQuery UI, the entire web would be at least 1-2 years behind where it is in terms of interactivity, and I don’t think that’s hyperbole. (It even takes the non-stop frown off my face when I’m writing Javascript. With jQuery, it’s merely an intermittent frown mixed with ambivalence!)
3. Sphinx / Thinking Sphinx. There’s a reason that, within about six months time, Thinking Sphinx usurped the crown of “most used full text search” utility from “UltraSphinx.” And the reason is that it takes something (full text search) that is extremely complicated, and it makes it stupidly easy. And not just easy, but extremely flexible. Bonanzle has bent Sphinx (0.9.8) into doing acrobatics that I would have never guessed would be possible, like updating it in nearly-real time as users log in and log out. Not to mention the fact it can search full text data from 4 million records in scant milliseconds.
Sphinx itself is a great tool, too, though if I were going to be greedy I would wish that 0.9.9 didn’t reduce performance over 0.9.8 by around 50% in our testing, and I would wish that it got updated more often than once or twice per year. But in the absence of credible competition, it’s a great search solution, and rock solidly stable.
2. New Relic. OK, I’ll admit that I’ve had my ups and downs with New Relic, and with the amount of time I’ve spent complaining to their team about the UI changes from v1 to v2, they probably have no idea that it still ranks second in my list, ahead of Sphinx, as most terrific Rails tools. But it does, because, like all the members of this list, 1) the “next best” choice is so far back that it might as well not exist (parsing logs with pl-analyze? Crude and barely useful. Scout? Nice creator, but the product is still a tot. Fiveruns? Oh wait, Fiveruns doesn’t exist anymore. Thank goodness) and 2) it is perhaps the most essential tool for running a production-quality Rails site. Every time I visit an ASP site and get the infinite spinner of doom when I submit a form, I think to myself, “they must not know that every time I submit a form it takes 60 seconds to return. That would suck.” On a daily basis, I probably only use 10% of the functionality in New Relic, but without that 10%, the time I’d spend tracking logs and calculating metrics would make my life unfathomably less fun.
1. Rubymine. The team that created this product is insane. Every time that I hit CTRL-O and I type in “or/n” and it pops up all files in the “offers_resolution” folder starting with the letter “n,” I know they are insane, because having that much attention to productivity is beyond what sane developers do. Again, for context’s sake, one has to consider the “next best” choice, which, for Linux (or Windows) is arguably a plain text editor (unless you don’t mind waiting for Eclipse to load and crash a few times per day). But, instead of programming like cavemen, we have a tool that provides killer function/file lookup; impeccable code highlighting and error detection (I had missed that, working in a non-compiled language); a working visual debugger; and, oh yeah, a better Git GUI than any of five standalone tools that were built specifically to be Git GUIs.
Perhaps as importantly as what Rubymine does is what it doesn’t do. It barely ever slows down, it doesn’t make me manage/update my project (automatically detecting new files and automatically adding new files to Git when I create them from within Rubymine), and it handles tabs/spaces like a nimble sorcerer (something that proved to be exceedingly rare in my quest for a usable IDE).
Like New Relic, I probably end up using only a fraction of the features it has available, but I simply can’t think of anything short of writing my code for me that Rubymine could do that it doesn’t already handle like a champ. Two thumbs up with a mutated third thumb up if I had one.
Conclusion
Yes, it is a list of apples and oranges, but the commonality is that all five-ish of the lists members stand apart from the “second best” solution in their domain by a factor of more than 2x. All of them make me feel powerful when I use them. And all of them, except arguably New Relic, are free or bargain priced. Hooray for life after Microsoft. Oh how doomed are we all.
The trouble started when I got home from work this evening and rebooted my computer per Windows XP’ insistence. Upon rebooting, I was dismayed to find my computer booting to its old partition (the half-installed Vista partition that came with this laptop before I installed XP). I had tried to remove this partition previously, but it’s been hanging around like mustachioed hotshots at the roller rink, reliably causing a BSOD whenever the laptop chooses to boot that partition. Unfortunately, as of this evening, the still-unidentified laptop demons decided that this evil partition would become the only bootable partition available on my disk.
It’s baffling that Mr. Productivity Crusader myself didn’t figure this one out earlier: it pays to organize and catalogue where my Bonanzle hours are being spent. I’ve done it at my day job for the last six months or so. I keep an open Excel spreadsheet that provides me a minute-by-minute breakdown of where my time is being spent during a given day, week, or milestone. Using Excel’s Pivotcharts, I can then aggregate results from my spreadsheet to reveal meta-patterns such as “Mondays are usually administrative-heavy” and “Milestones where I have the time to program go more smoothly.”