clockwork VS asdf

Either Clockwork or Debugbar.

https://underground.works/clockwork/ is super easy to set up and really good.

Get clockwork (https://github.com/itsgoingd/clockwork) so you can understand where in (or outside) your application you are getting an issue.

Give https://github.com/itsgoingd/clockwork a go - I made the switch a long time ago, haven't look back

90% of what I do is Laravel work and for every project, I use Clockwork. It puts all of the stuff below into a tab in Chrome's DevTools.

Funny timing — I just spent 4 hours this morning comparing Xdebug, Blackfire, and New Relic.

After feeling like my SaaS application is starting to hit some scaling bottlenecks, I had a play with all 3 services to try and get some insight for a real-world application.

A brief summary:

- Xdebug: Slow. Fiddly to set up. Fine for a development environment and day-to-day profiling, but things like Clockwork[0] are, practically speaking, far more insightful.

- Blackfire: Terrible UX. Difficult setup process. Their free plan is almost impossible to evaluate as it only shows you glorified stack traces, most of which are littered with vendor and framework files. I didn’t want to commit to paying a full year of their standard plan (no monthly payment unless options, unless you go for the highest tiers), so I happily uninstalled and moved on.

- New Relic: wow… one command and a server reboot later, and I’m seeing performance profiling, consolidated dashboards, error logging, MariaDB and Redis queries, frontend performance, and server capacities - with REAL data, on production! I’m very, very impressed. And it’s free for a single user…?!

[0] Clockwork: https://underground.works/clockwork/

Clockwork is a must-have for identifying hidden performance bottlenecks. It’s like DebugBar, but on steroids. Also seems to be kinda under-the-radar, it should definitely be more widely known :)

You might want to have a look at clockwork, it has a query logger and so much more.

Or if you need to manage more than just node, asdf has been around for over a decade and works great. You can use a .tool-versions to change runtimes for each project you have, in addition to managing your global runtime versions

https://asdf-vm.com/

Why not just use a tool like asdf (https://asdf-vm.com/) or mise (https://mise.jdx.dev/)?

These tools have the advantage of not being multi-taskers and can manage version for all your tools. You wouldn’t need pyenv and npm and rvm and…

We’ve even started committing the .mise.toml files for projects to our repos. That way, since we work on multiple projects that may need multiple versions of the same tool, it’s handled and documented.

The purpose of a version manager is to help you navigate or install any tools for development easily. Version Manager can be one tool for each dependency (e.g. NVM, g) or One tool for all dependencies (e.g. asdf, mise).

(asdf)[https://asdf-vm.com/] fully supports Python and almost any other language. I've been using it for Ruby, Python, Elixir, and other languages for years and never looked back.

Secondly, our development environments must not drift, because then code may behave differently and a change could pass on our machine but fail in production. There are many tools for locking down environments, e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc., and they all share the common goal of being able to lock down dependencies for an environment accurately and deterministically. And that needs to be enforced in our local workflow so we don't have to rely on CI environments for correctness. All developers must have environments that are effectively identical to what runs in CI (which itself should be representative of the production environment).

There are many ways this can be done (e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc.), and we won’t get into which specific tools to use, because we'll instead cover the essential essence of preventing environment drift:

I've really been enjoying asdf, which is a program that allows you to install specified versions of dev utilities as well as dynamically manage them via shims and .tool-versions files.

I use the asdf version manager.