My morning routine is starting again - TV is Dead.
I am back waking up early again and starting to get a morning workflow going... Let Charlie out, give him breakfast, put him back in bed, tweet my Question of the Day, write a blog, and get ready for work. I need to add exercise in this and I'll be ahead of schedule.
Tuesday night, we cancelled cable, not internet of course, but television and that silly phone thing that no one actually uses. We return our equipment this weekend, but even the feeling of cancelling TV was a bit of a shocker for us. However, I am excited to find out what we are going to do with our free time now. Apparently, I am going to work a little bit more and hone my wordpress development skills, PHP, and Dreamweaver. I think I have done so much in the .Net world, that I want to expand. WordPress has been so amazing and has come so far in such a short time.
I worked on my wife's website this weekend (yes, during the SuperBowl, Saints already won theirs) and was seeing the multitude of plugins to add a facebook like button to a website. 518 as of today. 518 plugins to add a connection to your facebook page that says like. I went through about 10 of them trying to find one that did what I wanted. I wanted a plugin that allowed visitors to like a photo or blog entry, but not a specific page but also have an option to like the site as a whole... but then I thought, I would want a way to like SusieMPhotography facebook page from my site. Of course I found JetPack (but that needs a wordpress.com account and seems a bit overkill for what I wanted). After going through several of them, I went to facebook to endure the arduous process of adding a like button. Took about 15 minutes doing it WITHOUT a plugin. It is not perfect, but if a website is ever perfect, then you are not keeping up.
I spent a good part of last night setting up a local wordpress blog in Dreamweaver, so I have a sandbox to test out all of my plugin, theme, and wp tweaks. What I have learned is that I enjoy creating. Creating workflow, getting ready to get ready to get ready to create. I like setting up a "perfect" work environment. I like figuring out the silly nuances of what the process is and how to make it more efficient. Most developers that I have encountered LOVE writing code. We are code monkeys. We love it. We like being creative with amazing clever solutions to problems, just ask us, they are amazing solutions. :-) However, most of us do NOT like the release process, the mundane part of our job... Configuring a web server, pushing files via ftp, verifying the cname/a dns entries are correct, that my httpd.conf file is including the correct modules, or that my web.config has the right authentication method. We wrote BEAUTIFUL code on our machine, we just want the world to see it. We endure the basic hassle to get to the end game, but why not make it easy? Github is now how a lot of people are sharing code. They don't even want to release it live on a website, they simply push it to Git and let someone else figure out the release process. I found it interesting that some jobs are asking for GitHub accounts to see what kind of code you write. That seems like a pretty good idea. If you hired a photographer, wouldn't you want to see their pictures? If you hire a caterer, wouldn't you want to try their food? If you hire a developer, wouldn't you want to see what kind of code they write?
So often, I have seen BAD code introduced to HORRIBLE code, and that usually occurs before I get there. Someone has a brilliant way of solving a problem so they implement it and check it in. Then someone else has a similar solution so they check it in. Now we have to methods to do the same thing written by two different people... ahh, I'll save that topic for another day (topic: managing code of egos). Back to workflow, so my question to you is this... and I will try to have a question (or several) for each post... what mundane or trivial task do you hate about your daily process? It could be checking in code and getting it to production, or it could be merging code with others, if you are a teacher, it could be status reports and curriculum guides that are submitted, if you are a tax professional, it could be every government form in existence. :-) But I'm sure you have something... Share what it is and let's see who has a way to help you make that better.
Thanks for stopping by. -me-
[
]