My Year in Software

Now that I have a blog I can do what every blogger loves best: make lists.

Herewith a list of the software that made an impression on me in 2009.

Expression Engine

I built my first two sites using Expression Engine this year, one for the Cumberland Chamber and one for the Downtown Courtenay BIA.  EE’s niche, in my view, is to make working with custom data types easy.  However, in most other ways it just felt too opinionated and difficult to customize (e.g. the related_entries features).  After building so many WordPress sites, though, the EE 1.x admin experience felt seriously unpolished.  Media handling, for example, paled in comparison. I look forward to trying EE 2 when the opportunity arises but until then count me underwhelmed.

Solr

The most pleasant surprise of 2009 was Solr, a fantastic search platform derived from the Apache Lucene project.  I used it to index and search a 40,000-product database and it was incredibly gratifying.  Despite my distinct lack of Java skills, the documentation was clear and the deployment was remarkably painless.  Even better, Solr replaced an unholy MySQL SELECT statement including four subqueries with one straightforward config file.

HTML 4

Not technically software, but it deserves to be mentioned.  Where possible I’ve abandoned XHTML and all its craziness and built sites using HTML 4 Strict.  I don’t need namespaces or mime-type headaches.  Straight-up HTML is just fine by me.

I bought a three-year-old MacBook Pro from a friend, my first Mac since an Apple II.  It was kind of fun so I ended buying a 27″ iMac a month later.  It’s a lot of fun.  The Unix roots of OS X paved the way for the next two items.

Git and GitHub

After letting too many Ruby projects rot away in private SVN repositories I finally moved most of them over to my GitHub account.  The main reason it took so long was the Git learning curve, especially for a Windows-user like me.  Once I moved the code over, however, I was truly impressed. The fork-and-pull mindset that GitHub enables so well is fantastic. My once-neglected plugins and gems have gotten a new lease on life since others started improving them.

GitHub activity for the Ruby Holidays Gem.

GitHub activity for the Ruby Holidays Gem.

rsync

Finally, one of my best workflow improvements was also the simplest: rsync.  Before I would deploy using SVN exports via bash scripts or straight up FTP.  But my new Mac finally made rsync an option.  For simple deployments it just can’t be beat.

Here’s me deploying an update to a WordPress theme.

rsync -rvzt --executability --exclude=.DS_Store
   /Users/Alex/Sites/client/www/wp-content/themes/client/
   dialect@dialect.ca:/home/dialect/staging/wp-content/themes/client/

All in all it’s been a good and productive year.

What tools did you enjoy in 2009?