March 25 2008
Noble Studios took us on a trip to Amsterdam for a 2 day workshop, team building, and they 5 days of whatever the hell we wanted. It was not wasted, although, we definitely were. The workshop was unexpectedly productive and the entire trip has brought the whole office closer together. We were mentally stripped down built up again. Personally I feel refreshed and focused. More focused than I have been in a long time.
We knew it was going to be a good trip from the minute we got the airport at 6am. Everyone was all smiles and completely embracing, especially towards Nicole. This is the first time they have met here and honestly, they probably, up until that moment, didn’t think she existed!
The flight was easy. We started drinking in Reno and didn’t stop until Amsterdam. Definitely made the trip smoother. Once we were finally there, and thanks to our pilot we got there an hour earlier, we unloaded our gear and headed straight for a coffee shop. From here the trip is a blur of laughter, fun, productivity, art, drinks, good food, and flight butt. Oh and the best pot I have ever smoked. I could probably go on and on on details that are unimportant except to those of us that were there, but I won’t. Basically, the trip was amazing. Everyone I work with is amazing. And it was absolutely incredible to have shared this experience with Nicole and crew. I can’t wait to go back to Europe.
Nicole and I at the Bushdoctor coffee shop:
Drawing and smoking at the Bushdoctor:
The best pancakes I have ever had in my life. Something I am going to crave for years:
February 21 2008
I wanted to talk a bit about working in an extremely unorganized and fast paced environment, and what I have learned to keep my code from blowing up in my face. In the ideal environment we would have the luxury of a development server, a staging server, and a production server, with proper source control and debugging/qa testing. When I say server, I really mean environment, these setups could consist of more than one server, but for the sake of just writing as I think, i’ll say server. What we really have is one server that acts as both development & production. Seriously. No, i am not joking, i’m serious here. We also have management that requires work gets done in unreasonable time frames. Such as, we need a custom CMS in 2 weeks with X number of specific features that really should have been planned out and analyzed and put into some sort of project specification before we begin work. Did I mention that I also have to cutup the html and css, and create all the required templates? No small task.
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February 11 2008
Yeah, this image sums up my weekend. I started reading the Django manual. Holy shit, I am way impressed and absolutely love it. I wish I would have gotten into Python earlier.
February 02 2008
I sat down this morning to try to outline a few of our processes at work that are a bit on the blurry side. There is no accountability for tasks, and for that matter, there are not any real roles defined to assign tasks to. In an effort to bring it all into focus I started creating a flowchart of a web development project. I also created flowcharts for handling a new client as well as one for working with SVN. I can’t believe it required a flowchart to visualize the process of creating/handling a new client, but it is apparently a bit more work than I thought. Anyways, back to the topic at hand. Graphs and charts!
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November 01 2007
I build a lot of websites. In fact I build too many websites. Every time I do build a site, I notice that I spend far too much time troubleshooting the basic layout in IE6, IE7, and Firefox2.*. Life would be so much simpler if I simply had a few common layout templates I could use as my base. And that is exactly what I have created. They are nothing to look at right now, but they provide a very simple framework for quickly developing the html/css structure of a website. I have tested the layouts in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 2, Opera 9, Safari 2 for OS X, and Safari 3 for Windows.
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May 17 2007
Coda brings all these tools together in one neat interface. You can organize your files using Sites, edit with the text editor, utilize the built in preview functionality, style your pages with the CSS builder and even access Terminal with one click for those times you need to do a little MySQL or other Terminal task.
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May 02 2007
I didn’t know it until it happened but our content coordinator submitted two of our websites into the Summit International Awards. We received a letter last friday stating that we took 3rd in the Creative awards in 2 categories under emerging media, one for “corporate website”, and another for “government website”. I was shocked. One, because I dont submit my work for awards, and two, that they actually were recognized. It feels good to know that the work I have been doing is ok enough to be recognized by an international organization.
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