Tuesday, August 15th, 2006
at 7:48pm
While my posts have been few and far between over the last several months, anyone who's been following along knows I've been wrestling with the decision over my preferred development environment.
A long time BBEdit user, I bit the bullet and (mostly) switched to Zend Studio back in November 2005. I was frustrated by Zend Studio's clunky Subversion handling, but within a few weeks was willing to put up with that for Zend Studio's great debugging environment and intimate knowledge of PHP that helps speed coding along on a line-by-line basis.
Then, I got a MacBook Pro in February. A 2.0Ghz Intel-based MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM went a long way to helping me get over how slow Zend Studio is on OS X. But, the switch to an Intel Mac broke Zend Studio's great debugger. Whoops! There went at least half of why I was using Zend Studio in the first place.
I emailed Zend about this issue several times over the following months, and when it hadn't been resolved by July, I chose not to renew my Zend Studio license. I toyed with switching to TextMate for awhile, but it just didn't have the oomph I had gotten accustomed to with Zend Studio.
I'm sure there's a valid reason that Zend hasn't shipped an update for Zend Studio that would allow Zend Studio Server's debugger extension work on Intel Macs in the 8 months since they first hit the market ... but for the life of me, I just can't imagine what it is.
Enter Komodo Pro. Komodo Pro 3 has supported Intel Macs for months. (Still no word from Zend on this issue.) Its debugging environment is based on the robust Xdebug extension.
What's especially nice is that while Komodo bundles Xdebug, I'm fully able to compile my own, along with my own PHP. In fact, I'm working through building Mashery on a MacBook Pro, PHP 5.2.0RC1 running as a fast-cgi under Lighttpd with Xdebug 2.0beta6, all through Komodo Pro 4.0alpha3. While I wouldn't necessarily recommend that exact setup to everyone, it's working out very, very well for me. (The Live Folder/Live Import feature in 4.0 alpha3 is critical for Zend Studio switchers.)
That's what it boils down to: Komodo Pro lets me work the way I want to, with the tools (and versions of those tools) I want to use. Zend Studio, on the other hand, does not.
Tuesday, August 15th, 2006
at 7:17pm
Mashery, the company I recently co-founded with Oren Michels, is looking to add a multi-talented PHP developer to its engineering team. The job description is below. The posting hasn't gone out widely yet, as I figure the really good people read the Planet PHP feed that picks up my posts in this category.
So, hop on this now if you're interested, before it goes out to the teeming hordes.
Stellar PHP Developer
We're looking for a kick-ass PHP developer. Someone who's done a lot, and seen even more.
Someone who's intimately familiar with PHP 5 OOP practices (we require PHP 5 E_STRICT clean code internally). Someone who doesn't necessarily love writing unit tests, but loves what unit tests provide. Someone who strives to produce better code every day, and who's open to new ways of doing just that.
Our ideal candidate will be someone familiar with the pros and cons of SOAP vs XML-RPC vs REST. Someone who knows what JSON stands for, and why it's cool. Someone who's a Savant, not a Smarty. Someone who cares about documenting their source carefully, and believes in decent commit messages (at least 85% of the time).
We think that a good fit for our team is someone who can (and does) compile their own builds of PHP for local development.
We're looking for more than just a code guru, though. We're looking for someone who can work well with others. Someone who understands that "perfect" can't get in the way of "pretty damn good." Someone who can accept suggestions for improvements from team members without getting defensive. Someone who understands that we're a business--so we have to ship to generate revenue.
Our person is someone who realizes that what goes into production must fail gracefully on the rare occasions that it fails.
Our person is also very likely an open source contributor -- someone who may already know the PHP community people we have on the team now.
Our person is someone well versed in a wide variety of tools and techniques, but is someone who's had experience with Prototype and script.aculo.us, and has spent some time basking in the rays of the Solar PHP 5 framework. Our person probably even has some C and/or Python chops stashed in the closet.
Finally, our person is someone who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Are you our someone?
If so -- and you know who you are -- introduce yourself to us at jobs [@] mashery dot com.
