Jason Leveille's Blog

March and April have been pretty busy months for me. Here are some things I’ve been working on, reading, studying, thinking about, etc.

• A few weeks back we deployed one of the largest site projects I had ever worked on (built using Plone).  The deployment went great and post deployment has been very smooth.  I’m hoping to find the time to write about my experience with Plone.
• This month I seem to have an abundance of PSD files awaiting template build.  Luckily, I work with some exceptionally talented designers and working with their PSD files is a pleasure.  One of the templates will skin a DotNetNuke site build; another will skin an ExpressionEngine site build; two will represent skins for custom solutions; and another will skin a Wordpress site build.
• For the past month or so it seems that I have been using every one of my spare minutes working with Pylons and Python.  The more I code in Python the more I’m getting sucked in.  My new blog (Wurdig is the name) is coming along nicely.  I feel like I have a ton more to complete, however there is no rush.  I believe I will have accomplished enough by early May to meet my Independent Project obligations, however I may or may not deploy the new blog until June 1.
• I’m looking at a frozen instance of Eclipse/Aptana Studio and wondering if I should just dump them completely.  I would say 40% of my coding time is in VIM anyway, and I don’t really need the FTP/SFTP/SVN support offered by Aptana Studio (all of which I can manage via command line).  I need to reevaluate this.
• I just finished reading Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 1.6 (and I’m currently writing a review).  This book has solidified my thinking that EE will be a good CMS choice for a lot of projects I work on (projects that have flexible template requirements, more fine grained access control, etc).  Luckily at the end of this month I’ll be starting my first EE project.  I’m excited.
• I just purchased 4 more books from Amazon and I’m looking forward to their arrival:
  • The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
  • Essential SQLAlchemy
  • HTTP Developer’s Handbook (Developer’s Library)
  • JavaScript: The Good Parts
• SimpleMC has been seeing some action on the SMC Google group.  It looks like a few more people are starting to use the project.  A developer friend of mine (whose work I really respect) called SMC heavy for the few things that it does do.  He is absolutely correct about that, however it provided me with a good learning opportunity for EXTJS.
• I’ll be graduating in May!!