Hello World! It’s been a while.

So this is the first blog post in a very long time. A lot has happened, it has been over a year now that I moved on from Instinct and the GetShopped crew to pursue a new life in the northern hemisphere. After 6 months for travelling through South East Asia and Europe (if you want to check out the photos head over to my personal blog  ) I moved in with my sister in South London hemorrhaging money whilst search for a new job.
So what exactly was I looking for ? Why did I leave my cushy job in New Zealand ? I was after 3 things.

Experience working for clients.
Working on WP e-Commerce I worked for customers, not really clients. To be a good developer I think everyone needs to do 2 things atleast once in their career. Work customer support, and work for clients.

A change of scenery.
I love Wellington, but after 5 years living there, I felt like I was stuck in a rut, and needed to travel to better my personal out look.

A more social web.
New Zealand had no WordPress meetups when I was living there, and WordCamps were very much a tease. So moving to the UK I am now able to head out to more social geeky events like WordPress meetups, Web meetups etc.

So at the end of last year I got myself a new job! I was lucky enough to be accepted into a design agency doing backend development. I get to work along side some amazingly talented developers and designers, learn new things everyday. The job mainly revolves around WordPress and developing bespoke Plugins. I sometimes work on CodeIgnitor (which makes me quietly weep). It’s a great job unfortunately the 2 hour commute, the 9-6 hours (amongst other things – for another blog post) means I hardly get anytime to contribute to the WP e-Commerce community as much as I would like to.

The workstation

I still run a mac, dual-screen setup. The biggest change it the applications I use:

• Text Editor: Instead of Coda as the all in one dancing dev tool, I use Sublime Text Editor 2 with a few extensions for WordPress.
• MySQL: No more phpMyAdmin sequelPro makes jumping into the DB for a quick scan a lot quicker and less painful!
• Version Control: I’ve moved away from SVN for most things, and am now fond (after lots of hesitation in the beginning) of git. Im still not as proficient with it on the command line, but the Tower app works magic. It can get rather slow depending on the size of your repository but it has a great GUI.
• Terminal: I loved visor / TotalTerminal, however I tend to spend a bit more time on the command line and there were a few bugs in TotalTerminal that just got to me. The workmates kept hassling me to get iTerm2 (aka a real terminal app) and well yes, It has made working the command line a little more enjoyable.

The workflow

I generally do not edit files on servers now (which I am very happy about). All work is done on local machines, if its a new feature it is then tested on the staging server then merged into master and pushed live. Its a great satisfaction knowing that everything is runnign through a smooth, controlled workflow. No more cowboy coding. Changes can be tracked and reverted if things go wrong. The system is not perfect or fully automated but it’s better than the old days when you had to work locally get approval and then do all the changes again on live (if you worked on a local version at all!)

Well thats all for now. Till next time!

development mac reference