It seems many developers get stuck in the same systems maintaining the same code for years and years. While it may be a common phenomenon there are a few things you can do as a developer to avoid being trapped in your own code forever. First make things readable. While your brain may be wired to a system of only using single character variable and function names or naming global variables after your cats, no one else will get the system.

There are some fundamental differences in how Microsoft and Apple does things. If you haven’t been aware of them before switching from a Windows based computer to a Mac, you’ll probably notice some of them pretty fast. One of the first things I discovered is that things are more “binary” in the Mac world. If you have an external device it either works with the Mac or it doesn’t. There isn’t that middle ground from the windows world where it almost works, but not quite - or worse it works in even week numbers but not when the sun shine.

For professional PHP development, nothing beats ZendStudio in my book. Currently ZendStudio is in the process of moving from a standalone application to something build on top of Eclipse. I’m sure it might be a wise move on the long term, but there are a few things bugging me with th current version. The number one issue is shown in the screenshot to the right. Would someone please tell either Eclipse or ZendStudio, that PHP files do not need to be build, compiled or what ever it is doing - besides wasting my time for a few minutes.

At work we produce a few websites and have a few “web dashboards”. Wouldn’t it be nice, if public screens around the office could play a little loop mixing the websites and the dashboards together in a slideshow loop? After an hour of javascript debugging, a nice little generic webpage slideshow was put together, and if you have a similar need a copy is now available in the lab. It’s simple, it should work in most browsers, and it probably has the least features of any slideshow out there.

It seems some websites produce horrifically long url’s and others (such as twitter) imposes some strict boundaries, which has created the need for sites such as tinyurl.com. With tinyurl you can post a long (even really long) url on the site and have a short (redirect through tinyurl) instead. It’s pretty smart, but I really don’t like being redirected to a secret destination. On tinyurl.com they luckily have an option (if you have cookies enabled) which allows you not to auto-redirect.