Like yesterday. And not.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost 12 years since we were all last together, and even stranger, that 20 years have gone by since we were teenagers graduating from Milton, casting off into the rough waters of adulthood.
Returning for the 20th high school reunion was a simple experience, not nearly as complicated as I had imagined it to be. People were more or less the same, perhaps a bit more weathered, but at the same time more relaxed and gentle, in the way that water and wind and a lot of time can smooth a rough stone. It was overall an opportunity to reconnect and catch up on the happenings over the last 20 years: the births, marriages, a few deaths. A lot has happened, but we fit together in that old comfortable way we always did — perhaps even better as any reason for discord has long been forgotten and the collective memory only retains the humorous and outrageous moments that good stories are made of.
For myself, I was reminded of the painful journey going from 13-18, and felt a little cognitive dissonance seeing it juxtaposed against the idyllic, privileged campus of Milton Academy. It really hit home how the fear, insecurity, anger, and everything else that governed my life at the time took away what could have really been something incredible.
Something that always applies I suppose…
After few months at the new school
Getting it straight.
Not the most scintillating material for those who don’t sling code, but I thought I’d write a quick post extolling my new development workflow for 2010. Having spent most, if not all of 2009, in a coding frenzy for my clients, small and large inefficiencies really slowed me down. I have a variety of projects and spend time coding in many different languages and platforms including Python/Django, Ruby/Rails, PHP/Wordpress/*, Javascript/CSS/HTML, and even some Perl now and then. Some of these projects have development environments, some do not. Some are under version control, and others are not. Some I develop on local machines in my office, others I have to develop on remote servers. Somehow it all worked, but I knew I wanted to streamline and optimize things a bit from a development perspective and really gain efficiencies from a common toolchain.
So first I decided to consolidate all my development locally on my HackPro workstation, which is more than up to the task. But running all these different platforms and frameworks on my mac was a bit daunting; using the stock apache has always been a bit of a pain and compiling and configuring my own builds on the mac just seemed masochistic. Enter Bitnami stacks — self-contained development environments including Apache + MySQL + Rails/Django/PHP, with an amazing selection of every major platform built using these frameworks. Excellent… an atomic Apache + MySQL build for every development environment was exactly what I was looking for. And, as a bonus, once it’s installed, it’s portable: I can easily zip it up, copy it over to my MacBook, and take it with me without missing a beat. Bliss.
Oh, they also provide VM images and EC2 cloud instances if that’s more your thing.