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Developer Tool Roundup

Saturday, January 28, 2012

I’m training new colleagues at work, so my mind has been reviewing all the tools that make the job easier. As long as they’re on my mind, I may as well share them.

Balsamiq for Mockups

Balsamiq is a very fast interface mock-up tool that has been making my life easier lately.

I could talk your ear off about it’s features, but your time would probably be better spent trying their live web demo.

Umlet for Flow Diagrams

I feel that I’ve tried everything for making flow diagrams. I once thought I hated doing application flow diagrams; but when I met Umlet, I learned that I just hate spending more time doing flow diagrams than is necessary.

There are other nice things about Umlet: It’s free, it runs everywhere and it uses an open file format. But I’d be lying if I said than any of that was as important as the speed. Umlet is really, really fast.

Vim for Editing

Vim is incredibly difficult to learn, but the speed makes up for it. It does everything any other editor can do, but with twice the learning curve and a tenth the time. If you’re only doing a bit of light editing, give it a pass. But if you’re going to spend a significant amount of time editing, learning Vim pays off in spades.

Developer Toolbar for Testing

Developer Toolbar is another tool that no one gives up once they’ve discovered it. You’ll learn it faster by just installing it than you would by reading about it here. Suffice to say, it tells you everything you could want to know about a webpage. It’s also now available for Google Chrome

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Python on Rails

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Ever since I saw that first Ruby on Rails tutorial, I’ve been looking for a way to replicate the experience with Python.

My personal opinion is that Python has a lot more “power under the hood” than Ruby – a more active developer community, better standard libraries, and more maturity in the third-party libraries that really count toward the bottom-line.

But what it hasn’t had until now was a really fast way to prototype applications. Some people might say Django fill this need, but I disagree. Django is built for marathons, and makes some sacrifices to meet that goal.

I’ve finally found a good ‘sprint’ framework for Python in Bottle.py. Like anyone doing a first project, I decided to create a dice roller.

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Recent Commits January 21, 2012

Saturday, January 21, 2012

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