Hey, folks! It's been 2 years since I updated the blog. I've been spending most of my free time working on a Climbing Weather site, which displays weather forecasts for climbing areas throughout the United States. My non-free time is working with a bunch of fun people at DriveCurrent. The motivation to blog on a regular basis has been pretty low - more-or-less non-existent. But, I think that will all change in the near term.
So, what's been of interest lately? At my day job, we've adopted agile method for development. We're still mostly using PHP/MySQL, but we're also doing much more unit testing using PhpUnit (which I think is awesome), plus browser-based testing using Selenium. Also, our current application is written using Zend Framework. At first I was not a big fan of Zend Framework, having written my own PHP framework built loosely on some of the concepts of Django. But then I realized that ZF has a ton of built-in flexibilty, which allows me to customize it to do things similar to how they were built in my own framework. Also, ZF offers a ton of built-in features that can be enabled, and provides a framework for all of our developers to work with (i.e., we don't all go down different paths to accomplish the same thing). We've also developed our internal coding standards and implemented PHP Codesniffer to make sure that the standards are adhered to. This is all pulled together in a new automated build process using CruiseControl.
On the ClimbingWeather.com front, I'm spent a lot of time improving the Python-based back-end. Recently, I upgraded the system to use Python 2.6, which will allow a smooth transition to Python 3 when some key modules catch up. Also, I changed my XML parser to use ElementTree, which is a super-easy-to-use XML parser. This cut down on my code significantly. I'm also now using NOAA's Degrib system to generate my forecast XML files. This is much more reliable than the web service and allows me to generate XML far quicker than the web service. The last couple days I implemented python-twitter for the About the Site page, displaying the most recent twitter updates.
Well, that's about it for now. I'll probably start blogging on a regular basis about the work that I'm doing. For now, just an overview.