Last year I did my first debriefing. I felt it was a good chance to take a quick look back and it felt good to reflect a bit and do a brain dump. So now I am at it again after a year that has flown by, in spite of some hard moments.

Personally this year had a tough start for my family, because the family business went bankrupt. I grew up in a house next to my parent’s greenhouse, so it was a central part of life in my upbringing. Acknowledging that it was the end of the road, and my dad had to move out of the house was frustrating. That said I am thankful that my siblings who both worked there have found new jobs, and my dad has adapted well to life as a pensioner.

Later on things have only gone forward. In the summer my girlfriend finished her masters, and just a few days ago she had her first scientific article accepted for publishing. I am really happy for her, and it makes for interesting prospects in the new year, where she will look to get a job and possibly start a PhD.

For me as a developer it has been a very exciting year, that offered plenty of opportunities. More...

For some time I have grown weary by the ever increasing number of consoles and one-feature-applications I end up using during a work day. The good thing about being a developer is that it is my own fault, because I can just choose to do something about it - and so I did.

First step was based on two blogposts from Scott Hanselman that I remembered reading; "Console2 - A Better Windows Command Prompt" and "Awesome Visual Studio Command Prompt and PowerShell icons with Overlays". Those two posts gave me a place to start so I could get rid of seperate icons on my desktop for cmd, Visual Studio cmd, Powershell, MongoDb, Ryby, Python, Node, Clojure etc. Basically I can now use Powershell with the capabilities of the Visual Studio Command prompt, and have the rest open in other tabs in Console2.

Of course I made a few tweaks of my own, but all credit goes to Scott for a great blogpost. Only thing I was disliking was choosing the kermit green foreground color, because it overrides coloring of eg. error messages.

Second step was reducing the number of one-feature-applications and long cryptic commands that I had to remember or keep in Evernote, .txt files, .bat files and so on. This turned out to be easy by using my profile in Powershell to store functions.

New-Item -ItemType File -Path $profile -Force
notepad $profile

In my profile I can make naming conventions that make sence and I can wrap more complex operations in easilly discoverable functions utilizing Powershells tab-completion. I can replace small tools and scripts for doing xslt transforms, builds, migrations, remote iis resets, deployment to my development machine and so on. What these tools do often turns out to be the equivalent of a few lines of powershell. Mostly something along the lines of this sample, which runs a nant script that does database migrations.

function Invoke-MyProjectMigrate([string]$version)
{
    Set-Location $path
    if ($version -eq "") {
        .\nant.bat /f:nant.DbMigrations.build db.resources.migrate
    }
    else {
        &{.\nant.bat /f:nant.DbMigrations.build db.resources.migrate /D:migration.version=$version }
    }   
}

After a while I wanted to put my functions into modules, so I could package them up, and have a set of functions for each project I work on. To do this I simply moved my functions into separate files, that I put in my d:\Scripts folder. Then my profile simply imports all modules from that folder.

Get-ChildItem D:\Scripts | Foreach-Object {
    Import-Module D:\Scripts/$_
}

With this in place a have a very simple, lightweight and extensible way of improving my tooling as I go. I can also use Posh-Git/Posh-Hg for version control, and if I need to get more structure at some point I will turn to PSake. In case you don't already know PSake is the Powershell version of make, rake, bake or cake. Simply put it provides a way to do build scripts with interdependent steps. So by now I am starting to feel pretty good about my tooling, and I have been able to remove a lot of clutter from my daily life.

For now my setup is very self-centered, because I use full paths to where I put stuff, but going forward it will probably be generalized and checked into version control for everyone to enjoy.