I've never been one to stop looking at new tools and figuring out if they can be applied to the work I do. When do I find interesting things, I like to talk about them a little and share. Here's what I've been looking at in January 2024.

Laravel

Yes, the artisanal elephant in the room. At my current job we are all-in on using Laravel. Which means not only learning how Laravel does things but evaluating every additional choices through the lense of "are we going to end up fighting the framework if we do it this way."

I prefer not to fight. Honestly, it's fine. People are having a very hard time separating how they feel about the people behind the tools from the tools themselves. There will always be things to dislike about any web application framework.

AWS

A enterprise level company with a large web presence relies heavily on the cloud? THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE.

I don't really have to worry much about going into an AWS console to do something, but I am having to learn about SQS and Snowflake. More importantly, I get to flex some skills behind building things that implement interfaces because my work projects will be dealing with multiple types of queues and multiple data storage back end.

Sometimes code architecture matters instead of being a way for bored or self-centered-while-misinformed developers to express themselves.

Helix

I am a big fan of modal editors as it is very hard to bulid a keyboard-centric editor without modes. After seeing some NeoVim folks say nice things about it, I decided to take a look at Helix and see if it is something I could migrate towards.

Lots to like here! Integration with language servers and Tree-sitter along with being customizable to a certain extent via configuration files. No plugin architecture yet though.

The show-stopper for me was that it does not have good Debug Anywhere Protocol support, which means I could not get Xdebug working with it. Not being able to use an interactive debugger is a show stopper for me now. Sorry.

Hypermedia

I talked about it briefly in another post here but I feel like taking a closer look at hypermedia and acceptable patterns for it might yield some interesting results in my personal projects. Again, I highly encourage you to take a look at Hypermedia Systems.

Bootstrap CSS

CSS and all the associated frameworks is something I also avoided over the years. My journey into htmx and hypermedia also made me take a look at the state of CSS frameworks. My longest-running project used a very old version of Bootstrap so rather than pull it all out and replace it with something like Tailwind (which my brain is having a hard time wrapping itself around for whatever reason) I'm just back to older, more stable tools.

When it comes to tools that I do not have a lot of experience with, I always need a reduced number of choices. Once I've mastered things more then I appreciate the extensibility and flexibility some tools offer.

Takeaways

After reading this post you should learn:

• I still like modal editors
• I am constantly looking at tools and languages and frameworks for suitability and ease-of-use
• sometimes the old ways were actually better instead of triggering nostalgia