Rafael Dohms has posted a new tip for developers (and really anyone else that has to concentrate on mentally challenging tasks all day) that could sometime help you break through that wall you've hit in your code - take a mental break.

Developers are modern day artists whose masterpieces are not hung on walls but stretched out thin on web servers all over the world, yes that is very poetic, but I really try to look at developers as artists and puzzle solvers. [...] A different activity, to most its the simple act of going to get coffee or water, taking a stroll outside in the fresh air, some like sports, some like games.. everyone has their escape valve.

He gives an example of a friend (Chester) who, when he hit a mark he just couldn't pass, turned to a set of lego blocks to help clear his mind. The subconscious mind kicks in as you preoccupy the conscious and a lot of times the answer floats up to he top with little or no effort.

On the techPortal site Ian Barber has posted a new article looking at debugging - not just in the usual technical sense, but also in the environmental and thought process problems that can come up.

Programming, as much as it is about machines, is conducted by humans, and is as susceptible to human error as any process. These bugs can be frustrating, particularly when found by a client, but they can give an insight into underlying problems, and sometime suggest solutions '" or at least ways of catching errors early. This article looks at four different classes of bugs: mechanical, mental, social and environmental, their causes, and some preventative steps.

He has the article broken up into his four categories - mechanical errors, mental errors, social errors and environmental errors. Each section contains a few things that can help thwart those sorts of problems including tools like PHPUnit for unit testing, PHPDoc for documenting your source and things more on the environmental/social side like seige for load testing or a Sun VirtualBox to test multiple environments.