In my first job outside academia, I was encouraged to break my habit of cobbling things together from whatever I could scrounge for free and begin spending money on the best hardware and software I could find. At the time and place, this was exactly what was needed for me and the company. Since then, I’ve continued to integrate the benefits of being frugal and using the best. In almost all cases, the best is the most frugal course. However, best does not necessarily mean the most expensive. Open source software is a very good example of this.

I love good development tools. Developer productivity can be a great investment. Hawthorne has been very generous in funding my passion for development tools. I maintain that this investment pays off handsomely for them. It makes me more production, more enthusiastic about trying new things, and spend more time outside of work playing around with technology. But even though it’s in Hawthorne’s best interest to buy me new toys, I am VERY grateful.

I’d like to show off two new toys Hawthorne bought for me today. The first is an upgrade to Komodo IDE 5.0. Komodo is the best IDE, Integrated Development Environment, for development in Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby I have found. It also includes Tcl, XSLT, JavaScript, HTML and XML facilities which I have not worked with enough in Komodo to evaluate, but I bet they’re also good. These days, you run across something in almost any language imaginable so Komodo is a great tool to handle occasional jobs in this class of languages. It can also help you leverage the vast amount of great open source technology written in these class of languages. Support for Ruby on Rails is especially good in the Komodo IDE.

The second is an upgrade from my old copy of Macromedia Studio 8 to Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web Standard. I’m mainly interested in the Flash IDE, but this suite contains a whole bunch of the latest great Adobe products, including Dreamweaver. I know enough Flash development to be dangerous and really need to learn more. I’d like Sliverlight to dominate so I can leverage my .NET skills instead of really learning Actionscript. However, that seems unlikely to happen and there’s a lot of really cool stuff going on with Flex and AIR which makes me anxious to really learn Actionscript. I guess an old dog like me can, and better, learn some new tricks.