Daily Post

After I graduated and started my regular 8-5 job, I was certain I'd have a great deal of free time in the evenings for personal projects and, of course, my much-neglected blog.

Turns out I was quite wrong! There are a few reasons for this, which I can boil down to:

1. Freelance web development contracts. My first one was with a printing company a friend of mine works for. It was for a Drupal site so I thought "no sweat!" Which was mostly the case, until I realized how much customizing I'd need to do to get the Ubercart shopping cart module to match the company's needs and requests. I didn't cut any corners with this though, which meant I had more than a few sleepless nights on discounted hours (it's a friend, I was being generous!)

2. Having a life. A novel thing for me, given how I used to live (hardly any friends in Canada) and how much I was engrossed in school or immigration paperwork until last May. Now that my husband is here, though, I can't help but take advantage of the fact I no longer have to divide my time between him and everyone else. I can bring him places, meet people with him, and explore the Bay Area in ways I would have never thought of doing if I didn't have someone new to the area with me. :)

3. New hobbies! Namely beading (as in, making bead jewelry) and Guild Wars 2, the first game in forever to obsess me nearly as much as the Sims (and that's saying something).

Well, I'm starting my first day back from spring break right, by being completely sleep deprived! :D

Admittedly, it's for a good reason. I'm doing more work on this jquery/php group project. Unlike this site, it's using Wordpress, so I'm having to relearn a few things about it (and already missing Drupal entities). The only reason Wordpress is even involved is to allow for the creation of magazine page templates. Which means, oh boy! More theming. I don't think it'll be too painful on Wordpress, though. I'll just find a good, solid base theme and mess with templates to create the different page types the client is asking for.

The harder part is figuring out how in the world you unit test something like that. I think I am failing at incorporating proper unit testing for web projects, since I've really never been in the habit of it on my own. (Guess who didn't unit test for THIS site?) I suppose it's because my group project is this big Frankenstein of different languages and technologies, so gluing them together is challenging. Like most everything I'm doing lately, though, it's a work of progress and we're learning as we go.

I definitely plan to try to do the new Anthegenia site properly, though. Coded from scratch with a framework, unit testing set up from the start... I'll even have my hubby be my client so we can work out some user stories, all in the name of test-driven development. I'm determined to learn all the best practices I've neglected in my years of sabbatical in Canada!