Adjusting to California

So I’ve been a resident of California for just over three weeks now and things are going well. I have most of my IKEA furniture assembled and most of my boxes unpacked. I’ve been kind of lazy with things lately but that’s OK.

PBwiki is really great. Everyone I work with has been super good about making me feel at home. I’m starting to get into some more complex projects. I’ve been meaning to get some photos posted but haven’t gotten around to taking any. Hopefully in the next couple days I’ll post some pics of my apartment and neighborhood.

Last week I attended the San Francisco PHP Meetup where Terry Chay talked about frameworks. In particular he discussed how off the shelf frameworks suck because of the consequences. He definitely was coming from the point of view of someone who writes very large highly scalable websites and in that context I very much agree with him. He did say that these frameworks are good for toy projects and enterprise software which I’d agree with.

I’ve really wanted to find a good framework to use and I’ve come pretty close with Solar and Kohana but I’m never satisfied with the trade-offs. I feel like I can use libraries from Solar or Zend if I need to as long as I code things properly on my end. I follow the same naming structure as Solar and Zend where my file names and classes match up and I use a parent “namespace” to keep my code from polluting the global namespace.

  • Glad to hear you're progressing with Drupal and that the group has continued. I had some trouble with the php group getting hijacked but it has been straightened out.
  • hey Andrew,
    happy thanksgiving!
    winter is reaching out it's icy fingers around here but so far little or no snow to bog down my commute to MATC. The Drupal class is going well. Mike Bertrand is helping me over various hurdles -AHAH and jQuery.He's also helping me fine-tune database connectivity issues with importing csv and forms data.It seems like a semester isn't really enough time to absorb all the information involved in learning Drupal but at least I'll have the resources to continue learning. Also, Blake has relocated the Meetup group to where Abraham works so that continues to be a good networking resource.
    I was really sorry to see you go but mostly for selfish reasons. I wanted your brain in class with me, but of course I'm glad that your new gig is a happy fit. There's an optimism in California that's infectious and it should help you ride the wave even in these financially rocky times.
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