If you’re in need of one last gift for the techie on your holiday shopping list, we suggest the following.

Caffeinated Soap
No, we’re not making this up. http://www.thinkgeek.com/interests/giftsunder10/5a65/ 
Between end-of-year project deadlines, gift shopping, and other holiday preparations, a coder can get really squeezed for time. And you don’t want to back a programmer into a corner where they have to choose between sufficient caffeination and personal hygiene. This should avoid any such unpleasantness.

A Blunt Instrument
http://www.harborfreight.com/4-lb-neon-orange-dead-blow-hammer-41800.html
There are situations in which you simply cannot improve upon a large hammer.  This is the reason that the B-52 has had such a long lifespan. This orange beauty will allow your beloved techie to vent frustration upon keyboards, desks, recalcitrant Solaris machines, etc without the risk of forehead or hand injury.

A “Come home for dinner late” card
It’s surprising how many bugs are found just after the “I’ll be home by 6:15 for dinner” phone call. Your programmer is now torn between a promise to loved ones and a dedication to hunting down that crash before calling it a day. Give them a Monopoly-style “Get out of dinner, free” card so that at least once this year week, they can arrive late without guilt.

A USB-chargeable flashlight
http://www.berettausa.com/products/jolt-usb-flash-light-b2c-only-blue/
A USB flashlight is insidious in its irresistible blend of techie-seducing features. First off, it’s a USB device. *Anything* USB (and to a lesser extent FireWire) is worthy of investigation. Secondly, it’s the size and shape of most trade show trinkets, which programmers are wired at birth to hoard. Thirdly, it has a genuinely useful function, which all but ensures your coder will make every effort to rationalize this gadget’s place in the laptop bag for years to come.

Carpal Tunnel Therapy
http://www.amazon.com/Roleo-Therapeutic-Carpal-Therapy-Massager/dp/B005CP4GDA/
Because sometimes you gotta play hurt.
(Not yet verified, but I think this thing can also make homemade ravioli…)

Yoga Gear
http://www.amazon.com/Office-Yoga-Simple-Stretches-People/dp/0811826856
Not only is this great for relieving the tension of long hours frozen at the keyboard, it appears to also be a crafty way of furthering ones career.

I recently got serious about golf again, after a near-decade layoff. Although I played on my high school’s JV golf team (and even managed to win a few matches), I’d never had any formal instruction. I was only able to muddle by with my substandard gear and hopeless swing because I was playing every day. I’ve played only sporadically since then, maybe one or two rounds a year, so my makeshift ability to get around the course has evaporated with disuse.

In order to become a better golfer I decided to start from scratch, beginning with lessons from a PGA pro and purchasing a set of clubs suited to my ‘experienced beginner’ game. And in the process I have found some interesting parallels between learning to golf (again) and learning to use a code editor. (more…)

SlickEdit 2011 is an unusual release. Typically, a release contains a good number of new features that enhance your ability to edit source code. This year, the words “updated” and “enhancements” play more prominently in the list:

• 64-bit Versions for Linux and Windows
• Multithreading the Context Tagging Engine and Auto-Reload
• Support for Ruby Debugging
• Support for Git Version Control
• Dynamic Debugger Enhancements
• Updated Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Support
• Updated JUnit Support
• SlickEdit License Manager

So what happened? Choosing what goes into a release is the toughest job for a product manager; there is never enough time to develop everything we’d like to get done in a given year. So we have to make hard choices.

We look at our customer base as a set of constituencies, each with different needs and change requests. Each language we support represents a different constituency with different needs, likewise for each platform. Fixing a tagging problem in C++ does little to help a Python programmer and vice versa. Some features, like Backup History, introduced in SlickEdit v9.0, are useful no matter what language or platform you are using.

Another way to divide constituents is into existing customers and new customers. Generally speaking, new features are considered more helpful in going after new customers, while bug fixes are aimed at existing customers. One consistent piece of feedback from existing customers is that they don’t really want new features; they just want the existing features to work better. In each release, we try to strike a balance between features to lure new customers and bug fixes for existing customers.

When we made the feature plan for this year, it became clear that there were parts of SlickEdit that really needed updating. As a product with a very long history—the first version of SlickEdit was released 23 years ago—we have seen some dramatic changes in the platforms we run on and the expectations of our customers.

In the early versions, resources were scarce so you needed to be as lean as possible, use as little memory and CPU as you can. This also makes your program very fast, which is one of our top goals. Now, a typical development machine has 4 cores and 4GB of memory or more. In this environment it’s frustrating to wait for an answer while the program is only using 25% of your available resources. That’s why the multithreading work was so important.

Don’t get me wrong. We’re not out to become a resource hog. We do believe that, for programmers, coding is the most important thing they are doing and that sufficient resources should be brought to bear.

As code bases grow, it’s even more important to have an editor, like SlickEdit, that knows the location and type of your symbols. Being able to generate that information efficiently and access it quickly is always our top priority. SlickEdit 2011 is a big step in giving you the fastest possible code navigation.