Lessons: Use Cases matter, and programmers (the users in this case) will choose tools that are both simple, in that they are not complicated/over-engineered, and easy to use, requiring little setup and code to accomplish a task.  For parsing data with PHP, constrast using something like SimpleXML or DOMDocument (which is light-years better than where we were in parsing XML just 5 years ago), to just doing json_encode() or json_decode().

While Panels is great for controlling the layout of drupal pages, there are times when you can't use the module to theme a page.  For uncached content, it does introduce some performance overhead into the drupal request change.  It can also be tedious to migrate changes from one environment to the other if you don't export pages and variants to version control.

When you're working in the stock theme layer, the following functions can come in handy.

This is a concise example showing how you can use the Features module to bundle configurations in Drupal into a module.  It's great to see the Drupal community moving towards using code to capture, reuse, and deploy configuration settings.  It's been the biggest pain point in working with Drupal for me.

There's a new release of the the one full-blown IDE that I've managed to stick with.  If Eclipse doesn't fit your style, give Netbeans a spin - I like its inline code completion, the source-code beautifier, and the integration with SVN and Mercurial.  I particularly find the source control usability much better than Eclipse.

Arne Blankerts - part of thePHP.cc, premium PHP consulting and training.

Today's keynote is about trends that developers across platforms and languages will face.  None of these should be big surprise if you keep up to date and "read the internet".  Presented by the VP of Technology at dzone.com.

I'm attending tekx, and while I'm taking notes in all the sessions with Evernote, I'll try to clean up and summarize my notes here as well.  One of the session's I attended yesterday was Eli White's session on Code and Release management.  It focused more on the techniques, policies, and practices to think about about and implement rather than the nitty-gritty howto details of each version control system.  I found that very helpful because oftentimes its difficult to learn how effectively use version control especially as part of a team's workflow.

I have to admit that i jumped over to using Habari for my blog mainly based on how well designed and obejct oriented the underlying API seemed from the documentation. Coming from looking at Drupal code all day, which is painfully NOT Object Oriented, yes with capitals, the code is more readable and, so far, less mysterious.

Its time to relaunch my blog as Bytes in the Margin. I like the new name, which is not an anagram of my own name. I was inspired by all the notebooks I have from school and work meetings, which are decorated with pen and pencil doodles in the margin.

While the title is new, the content won't really change, and I've left the Feedburner feed at RecordAsIAm still enabled, so hopefully I don't lose any subscribers.

Having a good debugger and error reporting can mean the difference between spending an hour hunting down the line of code causing bug and killing it quickly. For PHP, xdebug is my preferred debugger (are there others?),.  Thanks to this link on debuggable.com, I was able to find a precompiled binary for OS X. Setting up Xdebug on Mac OS X (or Win32 / Linux) » Debuggable Ltd