I currently work for the Big Nerd Ranch, which has one principal focus: week-long "bootcamps" to teach technology in an intensive, immersive environment. We are extremely good at what we do, and we want a web site that effectively presents our value proposition while making it easy for our potential students to learn about (and register for) our classes.
The Big Nerd Ranch project has three principle components: the public-facing website, which delivers page content and provides tools for customers to interact with us; the content management system, which enables members of our team to write and publish news releases, class descriptions, and instructor bios while maintaining current and future classes; and the business execution platform, which makes our daily operations as effective and efficient as possible, freeing our team to market our existing classes, look for new opportunities, and expand our offerings.
Blogs are everywhere, and there are many quite capable tools out there for doing them. Of course, using someone else's creation is not nearly so educational as designing and building one yourself. Since I teach PHP5 Bootcamp for the Big Nerd Ranch, I like to explore these kinds of projects: it is a fairly interesting problem, and each time I do one, I get a deeper understanding of the challenges likely to face PHP developers.
In the case of developerBlog, I wanted to focus on the editor-GUI side of the problem; specifically, to see if I could design a better set of tools for handling code (especially PHP, HTML, CSS, and Javascript). I simply found putting code in existing blogging tools to be annoyingly tedious.
Frameworks are integrated tools designed to support effective and elegant application development. Ideally, a frameworks should encourage (and follow) good design principles while reducing or eliminating tedious development work. When properly done, the application developer using a frameworks is freed to concentrate on the unique aspects of his/her problem space, hopefully resulting in a superior final product.
IWFrameworks is my attempt to implement a PHP application development framework. Part of the impetus for this project was vague dissatisfaction with some existing choices (like Cake and Symfony), but mostly, I derive a visceral creative joy from challenging problem-solving. I particularly wanted to explore practical implementation of design patterns.
This is really the fourth incarnation of IWFrameworks: at each stage, I learned new techniques and concepts, and recent work with the excellent PHOCOA open-source PHP frameworks (and conversations with Alan Pinstein, its inventor) opened my eyes to entirely different (and better) ways of thinking about framework implementations.
Establishing a good productive development environment is critical to the success of any programming endeavor. This "project" is an ongoing effort to track the updates and changes I make to my own development environment, a web and database server named Minethlos.
Quite a while back, I searched for mineral, rock, or fossil collection software intended for the serious collector. Nothing seemed to fit. To address my immediate needs, I used 4D to craft a custom application to get me started.
What resulted was an application with a nice feature set, but ultimately, 4D limited what I could do and I wanted to make a foray into Mac OS X application development.
MyMinerals is going to be a Mac OS X application designed for serious rock, mineral, and fossil collectors. With comprehensive support for individual specimen photographs, printed labels, and detailed libraries, MyMinerals will be the perfect tool for curating an earth science collection.
In 2001, Erik J. Barzeski created a little PHP 4 application called Techstra that bridged the gap between an author and his readers. Designed for programming books, it featured a page-search mechanism that shows author and reader comments and question, errata, hints, and exercise solutions.
In 2008, Aaron Hillegass updated his Cocoa Programming book and I decided to create a brand new version of Techstra. The only thing it shares with the original version is its basic purpose.
My Mom is an artist, and a prolific one: she has been painting nearly her entire life. She favors watercolor, but she has done pen-and-ink illustrations, cartoons, oil paintings, and colored pencil sketches. All through college (and beyond), my sister Judy and I (and other near relatives) received "Martha Cards" -- hand-drawn greeting cards stuffed with cartoons cut out of the newspaper, articles from the local papers, and quick notes. She has done commission work, placed her artwork in numerous galleries and volunteered paintings for the local church and community fair. The walls of my suburban Georgia home would be quite barren indeed without her talents (and I'm not entirely sure if I am allowed to hang artwork done by anyone else).
Through it all, she has painstakingly kept track of most of her work on index cards and photographs kept in numerous file boxes: the studio window is my attempt to provide an integrated tool for managing all these notes and photographs in an online repository, with an eye toward someday publishing a book of her work.
