While it’s always advantageous to understand more about a client and spend some time with them to get a proper feel for their industry, doing a project for one’s own brand involves taking a step back. We live and breathe what we do everyday, how do we abstract ourselves so that others can understand us. I admit that these are the same challenges that I felt over the years as rosemarylong.com (nee rosemarysanchez.com) constantly felt like an unfinished project.

Luckily, having driven team members with strong vision and a diverse array of talents helped devise our company’s online expression, constructively asking the question “why are we doing it this way?”.

And yes, spending time on *that* site made me feel a bit guilty enough to post new content on *this* site. Plus I can point out that my name is in the news section for the Big Rock snow that I did, whee!

I personally keep all of my project files in a “Projects” folder right under my home directory. Subsequently, each project (and subversion checkout) get their own folders. I also have Flash output being symbolically linked to the HTML site, but that could be another article.

Download, install, and pay for MAMP Pro. It’s great. It will do a bunch of setup stuff that I can’t remember since it’s been months since doing it, but it’s a relatively straightforward process.

If it didn’t do so automatically, start up your MAMP server. Switch to the Hosts view and then on the + sign at the bottom left to start a new project.

I always choose a Server Name to be something short and without spaces. When I run my localhost I will run it as mynewproject:8888 so I try to keep it short and self-explanatory.

Now under Disk Location, click on “Choose” and select the directory containing your project files. Click on “Apply” and you will be asked to restart the server.

Once everything is done restarting, you can either go to mynewproject:8888 (port 8888 is the MAMP default — I haven’t had a need to change this) or go to the Hosts view in MAMP again and click on the house icon next to your project’s name.

You’re done! If you need to create a local database, click on the WebStart button in the top right and you’ll see a link to your locally running phpMyAdmin. There’s a lot of help available online, and at least one friend here willing to lend a hand if needed.

If you want to want to see your site in a simulated Windows environment, you may want to read on how to configure your VMWare Fusion to view your MAMP server.

This reinforces the feeling I had in first year Computer Science: the joy of making computers do my bidding. Mwahaha!

For me, this was the case when I wanted to test sites I was developing in MAMP in Windows browsers. I tried the whole dyndns thing that the user manual outlines, but it didn’t work as I have a shared external IP. I reverted back to my old ways and set up websites on a subdomain of this one for testing. It was a huge pain when changes had to be done and tested quickly since I was constantly FTPing files and importing and exporting databases.

Today I listened to my inner diva (she often complains about doing tedious work) and figured it out, after over three months of doing it the hard way.

1. Check your System Preferences > Sharing settings and ensure that Web Sharing is off. You might also want to check your Firewall settings and allow connections for MAMP.
2. In VMWare Fusion, set your Network settings to Bridged. This will make it as if your VM and your Mac are peers but won’t restrict your access to external sites on your VM.
3. Check your MAMP ports. I went with the MAMP ports 8888 and 8889. You will need this for when you access your site from your VM.
4. Edit your hosts file on your Windows VM. Your hosts file is typically here: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc and contains mappings. I entered my IP followed by the local name of my website, i.e. if I access my site through http://intactgrowth:8888 on my Mac, “intactgrowth” follows my IP in the hosts file.

That should be it. Much simpler and better than my other idea, which was to download Wamp on my VMs and share my code between two computers (this would’ve meant lots of DB work as well).

Your programmer personality type is:

PHTC

You’re a Planner.
You may be slow, but you’ll usually find the best solution. If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.

You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it’s parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.

You are a Conservative programmer.
The less code you write, the less chance there is of it containing a bug. You write short and to the point code that gets the job done efficiently.

I used to be one of those developers that thought that in order to really call oneself a programmer, one must be able to program something from line 0. My training in University involved learning some low-level programming languages that taught us the importance of processing speed and memory allocation. In my mind it followed, then, that in order to make something good one must put all one’s discipline starting from low-level knowledge up to software engineering theory to code a product properly. This might have been good in said institutional days when every hour spent was willfully given in the name of education, but as I’m older and have more things to tend to surrounding my regular work hours, I’ve slowly emerged from this way of thinking.

It would be an exercise of modularity and reusability if I made something from scratch and then repurposed it for different projects.

Then for freelance projects I considered setting up a simple CMS like WordPress for clients with a nice template that they could edit their own pages.

I took this further and saved time in design by starting with one of those free-to-$50 predesigned templates.

In the past two weeks at work, I had been terrorized by the knowledge that we would have to quickly turnaround a multi-user custom-content website, and I racked my brain for a shortcut that would let us deliver the site in a month and a half as required. My first instincts included using Drupal, but the learning curve might be too steep to climb in such a short period of time. Next, WordPress MU which I am already familiar with. Sure it handles the multi-user bit, but how do I wrangle the idea of submitting posts to a blog into something actually usable for this particular project.

Then one night I found what could be the perfect solution: PhpMembers is a pre-built user management system that allows me to pile on as many custom-built pages as I want. It sounds like a happy medium as I don’t have to do the boring crap of doing user authentication and management and “oh boo hoo hoo I forgot my password” stuff, and instead I can focus on the cool parts.

In my head I was thinking of a way to express how the tedious stuff being eliminated allows more time for finesse of execution of the more important parts of the project. “Why reinvent the wheel when you can just find one and sex it up?” No, that doesn’t work, especially since I picture a stone torus with a prominent hole shape. For now, in my head I’m imagining that I’m just taking a pre-existing wheel and throwing glitter on it to pretty it up. I wonder if there’s a product or tool out there that can help me with my analogies.

I can’t believe it’s already been three weeks since I started at Comrade. It’s been a whirlwind, but the busy-ness and energy and focus at the company is invigorating. In my first week I pushed out a website, a push page (HTML email template), did some Flash updates, and a couple of estimates. Adding to that list, since I started:

• Two more push pages for different clients
• Half a website (functionality client demo, next week is making it look sexy)
• Another half-website for a different client (lots of multitasking here)
• Plans for our company site redesign (no, it’s not a common thing, but I’ve had involvement in redesigns for Critical Mass, Applied Communications, and now Comrade as well)

Culture-wise, I’ve discovered several other areas of a good fit:

• Communal oatmeal (I love oatmeal)
• During my tour I noticed a couple of bottles of unopened gin. Today while looking for peanut butter I found some vodka, and this afternoon I was shown the beer fridge.
• There is a Dreamcast, Wii, and Neo Geo in our lounge. We have DDR dance pads and Rock Band guitars and drums downstairs.
• The company summer event includes an overnight stay at Kicking Horse, BBQ and rafting, but the part that makes me the most proud is a day’s worth of volunteering at the Mustard Seed.
• Shared Japanese snacks!
• Fun with action figures (I’ve been reassured that HR policies are pretty lenient and I can be my usual NSFW self. Won’t do it right away though.)
• Everyone’s friendliness, honesty, willingness to collaborate, and drive to push out great work. We had a brainstorming session and it was inspiring and good-kind-challenging to hear aspirations of getting a Webby.

I’m even getting used to the tiny spoons that make me feel like an ogre whenever I use them!

Some vice triggers that I’m making a list right here to avoid overdoing include:

• Starbucks everywhere! When they open a DeVille across the street I’m going to have to exercise my strongest discipline.
• Manuel Latruwe and Bernard Callebaut also in walking distance.
• Aforementioned bottles of my preferred spirits.
• Sushi a block away too! They have amazing lunch specials for $9.50 or $10.50 and the food is really fresh and artfully prepared.

All in all, I really feel at home in my new position already. With our lunches out, outing to see Star Trek, and close-quartered collaborative work style it sometimes surprises me that it hasn’t even been a full month yet. Here’s to another two weeks of great work before I go to Australia to visit Ash and come back forgetting how to do simple tasks such as remembering my name.

Yup, I was kind of cranky in my last post because I felt obligated to write a post about my job transition. When I got the offer I wanted to tell everyone of course, but I hadn’t given my notice in yet. On my last day I was in no condition to blog, and I enjoyed most of my weekend computer-free. I’m going to be easier on myself this time and I’ll do point form notes, whee!

• Super excited to start my day, wore my spirit on a shirt given as a gift from a friend.
• So excited, I was at the train station 20 minutes early.
• Train trouble getting downtown meant lots of delays, and after it cleared up there was a passenger medical emergency on the train ahead of me so I had to wait longer. I had to run down 1st St and was 8 minutes late on my first day. (My 20 minute train ride got bloated to an hour long one.)
• Was ready to get busy into work, but was surprised there wasn’t a computer at my desk when I got there.
• I love tearing perforations/peeling stickers/opening things +  I love getting new computers = Highlight: unpacking my new iMac.
• Sushi lunch with the team followed by Starbucks. I could make a habit of this (oh wait, it already is among the other Commies). :)
• Looking forward to pushing out a redesigned site at the end of the week, but enjoying the slower-paced transition period in the meantime.
• Bringing in my DS tomorrow so I can get schooled by Weslie and Debbie. Heh.

I bugged Weslie that he owes me one more job since I got him in at the Learning Commons and Critical Mass and he was one of my references for this job. He pointed out, “But that would mean we’d have to leave Comrade.”

I don’t think that’s happening anytime soon.

—

Edit (immediately after initial post): See, nothing new for Twitter. @muunkky posted a link to results of the fire. I’m convinced that Twitter to us is like pheromones for ants. We just fire signals randomly but if a similar signal is caught by another individual, the strength of the signal increases and we are able to increase our knowledge. Through collaboration and emergence we are able to pinpoint something better than an individual ever could.

Problem:

Solution:

But wait a sec, I’ve seen this before:

(In case you were wondering what the Filipino Barrel Man is.)