Coder_At_Large

Coders - Programmers - Software Engineers - whatever we're called, we love writing code. Here we explore tools that work, and how to use them. We describe creative solutions to tough problems and ideas for becoming a high powered, free and mobile professional that can do more of what we really want to do - write great code on our OWN terms.

While we love programming, some of us want to break out of the 9-5 cubicle world and get more control of our own time.  To do that, we need to not only learn how to setup systems in our small offices without the help of an IT department, but we need to get good at solving some of the tough problems.  

Hopefully the information posted here will help good coders become great ones and work up to becoming more high powered professionals and consultants.  

Please comment if you can add to these posts.  We'll all benefit from better, more complete information.  

We coders need to stick together!

How to Estimate a Project - My Method

Estimating how long something will take is one of those necessary evils of being a software engineer.  Even though you don’t like it, your manager will probably need to make a schedule, even on an Agile project and will need your input to put your implementation tasks into the schedule.

Setting up a Git Server on Linux

As you probably know, having your own source control server buys you security and freedom, as well as options for collaboration and ways to rollback to any previous state.  You have the security of knowing that your last working set of source and all previous versions is safely stored on a server, away from accidental keystrokes on your busy development machine, and freedom to try any sort of crazy test code, knowing that you can easily get back to your last working set of code.

Drupal Camp Western Massachusetts January 21 2012

Drupal camp at the UMass campus in Amherst Massachusetts is scheduled for January 21, 2012.  The alternate date in case of snow is Jan 28.  

Tags:

Setting up Drupal Development Environment using the Drupal Quickstart VM

Drupal Quickstart is a cool virtual machine (VM) that’s already setup for Drupal development.

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that setting up a Drupal development environment is can be a challenge (but it's well worth the effort). First you install LAMP or XAMPP or similar stack that includes apache, mysql and php. Be sure to check versions since Drupal 7 requires a different version of php than Drupal 6. I haven't yet achieved getting a stack setup for debugging on my own either (although I think I was close). It involves installing an apache extension and some configuration that I haven't made through yet. And I've always wanted to use drush (the Drupal command line tool), but it turns out that more work is needed to get it working.

Subscribe to Swanware.com RSS