🎶 Once upon a time I was calling printf, my debugging skills were falling apart... Nothing I could do but then I found Eclipse, now I ❤️. 🎶

I have plenty of experience with debuggers: db, ladebug, gdb, jdb, NetBeans, WinDbg (affectionately known as WindBag), Xcode, and perhaps my all-time favorite, SoftICE. I've used them almost exclusively to debug low-level device driver code. This is my first time since last working on cutting-edge web code circa 1999-2001 that I've had the need to debug server back-end scripts.

PhpStorm seems to be the most highly praised option out there, but they don't offer discounts to non-profits, and it's pricey at $199 for the first year! The next most popular is Eclipse for PHP Developers, and the price is right: free. It uses PHP's Xdebug extension, and worked like a champ. I was setting breakpoints in my PHP functions, actually hitting them, inspecting variables, stepping through code, and fixing bugs (in 3rd-party code of course, not mine) with hasty abandon!

After three all-nighters in the past week, I'm really starting to get the hang of web development again. Don't get me wrong, I miss needing a debugger that lives below the operating system, and sifting through PCI buffer traces for broken command packets caused by multithreaded race conditions. Really, I don't. But someone has to make sure deadbeat donors with expired credit cards receive an encouraging email with a link to remedy the situation, right? That someone is me.