Scaffolds and structures

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 01:15:43 +0000

I often talk about leverage and scale: creating as much value as I can for as many people as I can. Now that I've been with IBM for a while, I see the personal benefits of that practice in the assignments I get and the help I offer my coworkers. In a way, I build [...]

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Drupal, Makefiles: save time, make awesome

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 23:05:13 +0000

One day I'll post a generalized version of the Makefile that makes my Drupal life so much easier, but in the meantime, here's the general structure I use: Lots of configuration settings: DB Database name for Drupal site DB_USER Database user for Drupal site DB_PASSWORD Database user password for Drupal site ROOT_DB_PASSWORD Root MySQL password, used to drop and recreate the database, and grant [...]

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Drupal rockitude

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:45:21 +0000

I joined my current Drupal project two weeks ago after documenting and wrapping up my other Drupal-based project (which I'm happy to report is chugging along quite nicely without me). Since then I'd been quickly going through my task list. I've also been poaching other people's tasks, such as the configurable group home pages and [...]

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Subversion: Restore deleted files

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 21:00:05 +0000

If you accidentally delete a file and then commit the change, you can retrieve the file along with the rest of the history by using svn copy to copy it into your working directory. svn copy -r revision-number your-full-repository-path-to-the-file file Common Use-Cases for Merging Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog [...]

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Working on a small project

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:42:44 +0000

Working on a small project means that I wear multiple hats, and that's helping me grow so much as a developer. Yesterday, I planned some changes to our build process and developed tools to make deployment painless. In a large project, all of this would have been decided already, and all I would need to [...]

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Drupal 5: Migrating a production database to a QA server

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:37:25 +0000

Building on the configuration management strategy I described last time, I wrote some scripts to make it easier for other developers to migrate the production database to the QA server or to get a copy of the production database for their local system. I needed to consider the following factors: Domain name changes: Because we use [...]

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Deploying to servers

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:38:25 +0000

I'm heading to the Philippines tomorrow, and to make life easer for the two other Windows-based PHP developers on my team, I updated the web-based deployment script I mentioned in Development kaizen: deployment and testing. I added the ability to push a specified revision to the production server. It took me less time than I thought [...]

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Emacs: Keyboard shortcuts for navigating code

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 09:48:33 +0000

One of the lines on my list of things I can do in order to make progress on my book is to move my Drupal development environment from Eclipse to Emacs, as immersion would no doubt give me plenty of things to tweak and describe. When you use something every day, you notice the rough [...]

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

How to find great developers

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 04:27:00 +0000

Joel Spolsky writes about finding great developers. Internships are a terrific way to scope out a candidate and also get them passionate about your company. Previous blog post about career aside, I do really like IBM and I *am* really curious to see how far we can take social software - and one of the reasons why I'm crazy about that company and all the cool people in it is because I've seen it from the inside, thanks to the IBM Toronto Centre for Advanced Studies.

Check out the essay.

More thoughts: One of the things that frustrates me about the Philippines is that we've got this entire chicken-and-egg problem in the schools. Few companies do on-campus recruitment for challenging internships, so students don't get motivation or experience - which is why few companies bother to do on-campus recruitment or R&D. Programming competitions help, I guess, and we do still manage to find a couple of geeks who learn about open source and end up teaching themselves. Still...

On Technorati: development, management, hiring, hr, philippines

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Working with Emacs

Fri, 01 Jul 2005 16:12:00 +0000

A recent post on the Philippine Linux Users' Group suggested a separate plug-emacs mailing lists for all the Emacs messages that have popped up recently. The suggester said: There is a difference between discussion and stroking each other's ego. :) Working with Emacs is a humbling experience. It brings you face to face with accumulated centuries of developers' work. Emacs involves people in its development to an unusual extent. Working with vi and even Eclipse made me feel more like a user than a co-developer. Working with Emacs made me feel part of the community, even when I was still struggling to make sense of the parentheses. If in that sense, Emacs worship is considered ego-stroking, then sure, I'm guilty. I can't help but express my appreciation for one of those things that has really changed my life and made free, open source software really meaningful to me. For the culture, really, that made it possible. It's a piece of software, but it's also a conversation with so many developers around the world. To newbies: if you're curious about the thrills of open source development and you want a nice, easy way to get started, why not try modifying Emacs? It's easy to pick up. All the source code is there, and you can modify it on the fly. We've had complete non-programmers try it out and fall in love with programming. They get thrilled when they share their tweaks and other people respond with comments and suggestions. This is good stuff. Try it out. =) I suppose Emacs is off-topic. After all, it's cross-platform, not Linux-specific. I could easily be extolling the wonders of Emacs on Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, or BSD. Emacs doesn't require Linux. (Neither does Apache, but you don't see people waxing lyrical about web servers that often, do you?) The flood of Emacs-related posts that deluge the list whenever someone unwittingly brings up the topic is probably incomprehensible to people who've never tried Emacs or tried Emacs as just an editor and didn't like it. Still, I want to share what makes open source real for me. Not kernel hacking, which is still too intimidating despite the existence of projects like kernel-janitor. Not network or system administration, which I don't have the patience to do. Just the free and flexible customization of something I use everyday and the thrill of sharing these customizations with other people in a community that spans the world. I guess that's why I post on PLUG instead of plug-misc. I don't think PLUG should just be a venue for asking and answering technical questions, but also for sharing nifty hacks and examples of how far a Linux system can be pushed. Other people push their systems in terms of hardware and services. I push mine in terms of how well it can fit me, how well it can anticipate my needs. I want to stroke other people's egos. I want people to discover how they can contribute to free and open source software, to experience the thrill of seeing their code out there and being used. Open source development isn't just for PHP wizards or C freaks who can contribute to existing projects or launch an entirely new project on their own. Maybe—just maybe!—people who thought themselves just users of a text editor will be inspired to think about how they can start customizing their own. コンピュータを使えば時間に節約になる。 Computers will save you a [...]

A question of scale ([[OpenSource#note2][OpenSource:2]]"[[oss]]"[[OpenSourceIssues#note2][OpenSourceIssues:2]]"[[ToBlog#note2][ToBlog:2]])

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 01:11:00 +0000

Open source allows people to work on an individual basis. Developers can jumpstart their projects by using existing code, creating software that answers their own needs and perhaps the needs of a small group of users that often also contribute improvements. Because the source code is open, people can easily choose the features they want to include or make minor modifications to get existing code to behave the way they want. Open source development promotes personal communication with users, and user requests can go straight to developers without passing through marketing. How is this different from other kinds of user-developer relationships, and is this an advantage open source developers can use?

On Technorati: opensource, development

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!