New 'Summer' Project


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OK so I have proven decidedly rubbish as blogging in this 12412 [12412.org] lark but having said that on the front page of 12412 they have got May’s project written up in June and nothing for July, so I don’t feel too too bad (But still very guilty) I have managed to calm down a bit by looking at what I have at least tried to learn this year:

Adaptive Design Puppet [puppetlabs.com] Symfony [symfony.com] A more productive use of VMWare’s ESXi [vmware.com] More productive use of Citrix’s Xenserver [citrix.com] SASS which suggests I have a made a good stab at it all with 5 of the past 7 months covered. I may even manage to update (retrospectively) my blog to show what I have done. There are a couple of other projects I am looking at getting under way including Vagrant [vagrantup.com] (An open source vm creation tool using Oracle’s open source Virtualbox [virtualbox.org] as it’s basis), Deployment management tools such as Capistrano [github.com], and CI [Continuous Integration] such as Hudson [hudson-ci.org/].

Those of you who are, let’s say geekishly inclined (My target audience for most of this blog) will have noticed a theme here. Some of the programming related stuff mentioned above (SASS, Capistrano etc) as well as some of the Devops stuff (Puppet, Vagrant etc) are ruby gems. As such I have decided September’s 12412 will be a real concerted effort to learn Ruby! I have debated it on and off for a long time (And also debated learning it vs say Python 3) I have nothing against the python community. They have given the world some excellent tools such as s3tools, trac, mercurial (to a degree) etc. However as a lot of the tools I use or am planning on using (Redmine, capistrano etc) are ruby based, and a lot of ruby gems are hosted on github - my prefered git hosting service. Therefore I feel, at this time Ruby is worth trying more than python. One day I will learn python, but at the moment it has to (sadly) be placed on the back burner along with my planned trip to New Zealand, an Ashes tests in Australia, A visit to DrupalCon Australia etc. August’s project is Puppet I have decided as that is what I have been reading up on mostly this month - and with DrupalCon Munich coming up (I leave on 19th.) I want something I can play with locally incase net isn’t too good from my hotel (As DrupalCon is a geek conference it would be a shame if we are on poor net but it does happen) And puppet seems ideal as I can use standalone mode with VM’s on my Macbook Pro.

In other news, I have finally got round to starting to build the redesign for this site and my company site [contemporaryfusion.co.uk] into Drupal 7 and also put some resold products on the site too. I am targeting launching them during September, but I am not going to publically announce a date as I know I won’t stick to it! I will also be starting to blog from my company blog on issues such as web security, topics of interest in the PHP/Drupal world, possibly also in the Symfony, Wordpress and Ruby world too. These will have a more corporate and less personal style than this blog (I hope!) but we will have to see what happens I guess. I also want to blog more often here, and include more on Cystic Fibrosis both research and fund raising as I am constantly in awe of people who manage to do so much good fund raising, and here I am sat on my backside seemingly not doing much!

Anyway I think that’s enough of a catch up for now. More blog entries (And details) to follow soon. Feedback on any of the above, welcome as always.

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