Ignored By Dinosaurs 🦕

So it's been a while, eh? Not too much in the mood to write about what I've learned when most of what I've learned is how much I have to learn, y'know? Anyway, I've been back into Ruby on Rails lately, since Ruby has got to be the dead simplest real programming language out there. Oh yeah, and I have a major project cooking on Rails, but I'll elaborate later. Let's talk about version control...

Let's pretend you're typing that last term paper in college. This is the modern era, so we're using a word processing program. That program has eaten a few of our papers over the course of our college career, so we know to save our paper often. This is a huge paper, so we've also decided that it'd be prudent to save it under different names as it progresses so that we can go back in time to an earlier version with no hassle, y'know just in case we stray too far from the objective in the future. This is basically the same idea behind version control.

When dudes or dudettes are sitting at their text editors coding away at whatever they're coding, in whatever language, they're typing characters into a keyboard, just like I am now. The difference with software is that there are usually numerous files that all relate to each other in some way, and a change in any one of those files will impact the entire application. So say you make one little change here and another little change there, and then you skip over to another file and make a change there, and then you skip over to another file and make a couple of changes there. How the hell are you supposed to keep track of all that? Version control.

Whatever the flavor – CVS, Subversion, Git – all version control systems track changes made to the files in your fledging (or production) application. The manner in which they do this varies from system to system, and they all have their proponents and detractors, but that you have GOT to be familiar with at least one of them is beyond dispute. These will give you the ability to hack around all you want in the comfort of knowing that you can roll these changes back if you're not getting anywhere.

Now, the only problem with all of these version control systems is that they don't track changes to databases. The reason that this is a big deal is that the vast majority of large, modern, dynamic websites store a lot of data in their database. Some content management systems like Drupal actually store templates that determine how the website gets rendered to your browser in their database by default. You can change this if you know what you're doing, and that assumes a lot. Nothing is going to change the fact that many database powered websites have to occasionally make changes to the layout (schema) of their database to incorporate new features and the like. The new Like feature on that site probably has it's value stored in a column somewhere in a database. What if that feature sucks or is buggy? How can you roll back a database to an earlier state without using up your quota of blood pressure meds too soon? Under traditional version control systems, you can't.

Luckily, someone has figured this out for us. It's called a “migration”. I'll be back. I promise...

#general-development

Finding Your Co-Founders: “The hardest part of starting from scratch is finding the right co-founders. Ideas, comparatively, are easy. You may spend three years finding your co-founders while you'll come up with a solid idea every 3 months or so. Luckily, once you settle into a great founding team you'll be able to execute much faster on that killer idea you all come up with – beating those ten other folks who came up with the same idea at the same time.”

Yes.

(Via TechCrunch.)

Communities of Creators: “What I've found, though, is that being part of an active, ambitious, supportive and diverse community of peers is just as valuable, if not more so, than any of the more prosaic prerequisites for success.”

I'll bet that's true. Maybe I'll find out someday.

(Via Anil Dash.)

It's been an inordinately long break, friends, and for that I apologize. I've been engaged on a weeks-long bender of brain expanding self-education on many fronts, plotting medium and long term career paths, taking stock of the current situation and options. For fans of the band I'm in, have no fear, I have no options at this point. The dearth of verbiage here goes hand in hand with the intense push to expand the possibilities there.

A f-ing killer free programming class that some kind dude just started yesterday on Reddit. Anyone who's at all curious about how computers work or and of this stuff might want to have a look...

Programming Classes.

Traveling, of course. By myself, of course. In Georgia. Train terminal in middle GA, taking a train to Europe. Forgot my wallet – had to go back and get it. got lost. Couldn't find my way, repeatedly. Ended up in McDonough, but it was huge and congested. Met some hippy kids. Ended up at a music store. Ended up in the rain. Ended up outside McDonough and it was a giant city on a hill. Beautiful.

Was telling Michelle about it and she said it sounded like my life.

Someone left this as a comment for me on Facebook (I think), something in reference to a snarky status update I made about Phish and my not really giving much of a shit about them. I meant this in a mildly light-hearted manner, but I got more comments on it than most Railroad Earth updates get. People get fired up about some Phish, boy!

I will admit a certain amount of aggravation at Phish, not because they haven't worked their butts off to get where they are, and not because they aren't smart and well-managed with good music to boot (to some), but for other socio-economic reasons. Whomever posted the comment about the tall trees crowding out the saplings has a very definite point, and one that speaks to the core of the problem with the music business. In the 5 years since Phish “retired” an entire festival culture managed to spring up in it's place. I don't personally believe that Wakarusa, Bonnaroo, Rothbury, or any of the rest of them would've have been able to take root and become the ecosystem that they have without Phish's absence. And for Phish to come back at the time that they did – with the economy already in the shitter and festivals thusly placed on shaky financial ground – seems a little bit rude to me, as a casual observer.

Now, why should Phish give a rats ass about Langerado? They shouldn't, I suppose, because business is business. If Phish has a superior product to whatever festival or band might otherwise get the attendance and people vote with their wallets to go to Phish, then more power to them. Personally, I hope once this year is over and people have gotten their fix Phish either goes back to cashing checks from their investments or sees some decline in their numbers next year. I don't care how good they are, how big they are, how hard they've worked, or how long they've been around, Phish is a Dinosaur exacerbating the issues that have essentially taken down the old way and are keeping a chosen few on life support. They become a logo for the popular music press to feel like they've given some face-time to the “alternative”. They become an easy distraction for music lovers out there that would otherwise be looking for a new band, a relevant band, to follow around. I'm not just talking about RRE. I'm talking about every band and festival in our scene.

I don't personally feel that Phish's return has impacted RRE one single bit, for better or for worse, but I do get the sense that something very big has entered our ecosystem here, and I don't want to be anywhere near it, ever. Sorta like the T Rex in Jurassic Park...

I think I'd better start writing them down. My list of things that I want to accomplish on the RRE website is only getting longer as I tick off more of the major infrastructure aspects of the site. Luckily the foundation of the site seems to be stable enough and the initial reaction was pleased if not excited. I think everyone is willing to cut some slack, which is good. So. The list...

Media page – needs attention. The media player is slack, the photos are non-existant and the entire look just needs some style. CSS will take care of some of it, but making something more of the audio player is going to be necessary. I've been poking and prodding at the Tumblr API to see if I can get it to provide the simple functionality while taking the burden of hosting and updating the actual audio off of our host. Their API is pretty cool, too. If I can just figure out how to write a function that will hit the RRE Tumblr page and just pull off the audio for this page and the photos for that page, and then parse the XML results so that I don't ever have to do a thing except upload stuff to Tumblr and have that update the RRE site automatically, well that'd be cool as shit.

Tour page – Needs CSS to be more legible, less cluttered. This whole thing was built with tables, which still obey CSS, right? Complete noob, here...

The artwork – Yes, the artwork. I'm gonna try my all to make this happen myself, since the only way I learn these coding things is to make myself figure them out. The pressure is gentle for the time being, but I have a feeling if any more than a couple of weeks go by without some art getting up there I'm gonna hear all about it. Luckily I have ideas and help.

Band bios – The pages exist. Actually, if you really wanna know what's going on in my head as it happens you might wanna check out the Sitemap. This is sort of like a map for Google and other search engines to follow so they can have a rough clue about what is on your site and how much of it there is without crawling every single page every single visit. It also is a good thing to do for SEO.

By the way, search engine traffic has increased 10 fold in the last week.

My cherry is no more. Yesterday I fired off my first real website. Nothing exploded except for the email for a little bit. Turns out when you switch servers, the email and the website don't show up at the same time. So most of today was spent learning about MX servers and stuff. The documentation out there about what to expect from your website when you pull a host change is quite shitty, so I'll have to write a chapter in the Moron's Guide about it.

Anyway, I'm totally fried, and taking a break from the Thesis Wordpress theme for a bit. It's great, but I need to get sharp with some CSS skills now so that I can get on with the style now that I know somewhat how to walk.

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