So, I’ve been meaning to talk about this Clint Florence Now thing. Not the man himself, you know, but what he’s been putting out there recently. I finally got around to really digging into it, and well, it’s been a bit of a journey, let me tell you.
It all started a few months back. I was just fed up. My development environment, the whole shebang, it felt like I was wading through treacle just to get simple stuff done. You know the drill: updates breaking things, plugins conflicting, everything chugging along like it’s running on a potato. I’d spend more time fighting the tools than actually, you know, working.
My Breaking Point
The real kicker was this one project, a small thing for a local charity, a passion project really. I was trying to whip up a simple database front-end for them. Should have been a week, tops. But my fancy IDE, the one that costs a small fortune every year? It decided to have a meltdown. Corrupted project files, constant crashes. I lost two full days of work. Two days! On something that was supposed to be straightforward. I was fuming, seriously fuming. My wife even asked if I was okay, I was stomping around the house so much.
It reminded me of my old gig, actually. We had this massive, over-engineered system. Everything was supposed to be “enterprise-grade,” which just meant it was slow and impossible to change. We had:
- A front-end built with some obscure framework someone thought was cool five years prior.
- A backend that was a patchwork of three different languages because different teams couldn’t agree on anything.
- And the deployment process? Don’t even get me started. It took half a day and a prayer.
Trying to get anything done there was like pulling teeth. Every simple change was a week-long negotiation. I swear, I spent more time in meetings arguing about tooling and architecture than writing actual code. One time, we had this critical bug, site was down, and it took six hours just to get a hotfix out because the build pipeline was so brittle. Six hours! Customers screaming, management breathing down our necks. It was a nightmare. I left that place, eventually. Couldn’t take the stress. Needed something simpler in my life.
Discovering the “Now” Approach
Anyway, back to my recent frustration. After that charity project debacle, I was just scrolling, looking for an alternative, anything. And I stumbled upon some talk about “Clint Florence now” – his new philosophy, or maybe it’s a set of super lean tools he’s championing. The whole idea was about stripping things back to basics. No bloat, just fast, efficient tools that get out of your way.
So, I thought, what have I got to lose? I found what seemed to be the core of it – a really lightweight editor and a set of command-line utilities he’s been promoting. First thing, I backed up my old setup, just in case. You learn that lesson the hard way, right?
Then I dived in. Installed the editor. Took about 30 seconds. No kidding. Fired it up. It was… basic. And I mean that in a good way. No flashy stuff, no pop-ups asking me to sign up for a newsletter. Just a blinking cursor.
I started configuring it, slowly. Adding only what I absolutely needed. It was a bit of a mindset shift. I was so used to having a million features at my fingertips, even if I only used 10% of them. This “now” approach forced me to think about what I actually do day-to-day.
The first week was a little rough, not gonna lie. I kept reaching for keyboard shortcuts that weren’t there. Had to look up how to do a few things that were muscle memory in my old environment. But, and this is the important bit, I wasn’t fighting the tool. If something wasn’t there, it was because it wasn’t meant to be. It was liberating, in a weird way.
Now, after a good month or so, I’m actually faster. My machine runs cooler. I’m not waiting for things to load or index. It’s just… code. The way it’s supposed to be. I even revisited that charity project, rebuilt it with this new setup, and knocked it out in three evenings. No drama.
So, that’s my experience with the whole “Clint Florence now” thing. It’s not for everyone, I guess. If you love your kitchen-sink IDEs, more power to you. But for me, after years of dealing with overly complex systems and bloated software, this stripped-down, focused approach is exactly what I needed. It’s made coding feel fun again, not like a chore. And that, right now, is pretty darn good.
