January 14-16, 2011. GiveCamp
Dallas GiveCamp: A chance to rub elbows with some of DFW’s strongest programmers, see them in action, and burnish my own resume a little in the process. Tim had to practically drag me along, pointing out that since I was working for free (less meals & snacks), there’s no way I could be less use to the project than my pay.
Turns out I should not have worried. As I met my team, there were several different skill levels present, and one, James, was a recent IT convert like myself. Also, since we were going to working in a new CRM that nobody had really seen before, everyone was going to be bumping around a good deal and asking each other lots of questions. Between that, and a quick explanation of my utter n00b status, folks seemed happy enough to work with me & nobody got frustrated with my pestering questions.
Friday afternoon started in a whirl. Tim likes to say he was useless that day, though his backpack was indispensable. Quickly accessing the needs of the project, the skills of his team, & the limitations of the local internet access , he actually put us on Saturday morning’s problems a whole day ahead of every other team. Tim also became our team’s IT manager for the event, turning his beast of a laptop into both a local network hotspot, and a server so that we could install Sitefinity 4, and actually get to work.
… Or could we?
Much has been made over the mistakes Telerik made in launching Sitefinity 4 and the subsequent bad taste it left in the mouths of hundreds of the most influential developers in the US. As a CMS, however, its drag-&-drop nature does lead to a smoother learning curve. Considering that the last time I used a CMS there wasn’t yet a term for it, this was a very good thing.
I liked how it allowed us to give CSS development to one member once we had a flimsiest notion of what the style would be, by allowing those of us developing pages to apply a template to our pages. The style would be developed on the template. Sitefinity pushed our widgets & content blocks around to conform to the template. As it changed, our pages updated. I suppose that’s the point of CSS in the first place, but this made it neat and clear.
There’s even a way to design new widgets & merge them into your Sitefinity process. Don’t ask me how; the evangelist even admitted the process was arcane. Sounds like they need a new widget widget.
Saturday saw me actually learning & taking a problem apart. Boy, was that messy! I assumed that a zip file that had all the GiveCamp branding files for media releases actually had all the GiveCamp branding files for media releases. Silly me. I must have lost an hour figuring out how come they didn’t get recognized, and blamed the easy scapegoat, rather than looking at what I was sending up. Still, I had a good looking media page when I was done: some job satisfaction.
Sunday, I went through & checked the new site to make certain that its links were pointing to the new site, and were relative, not absolute. Most were, save where I’d done it wrong.
Socially, This was a good weekend. I came off like a newbie not a n00b, and think I gave a good acquittal of myself. Tim’s bringing of Dominion was a hit. I tied once, but a poor strategy left me with too many cards in late game on the second. I crashed and burned.
Terms I had to look up:
CMS: Content Management Service
People I met:
Tim Proffitt: Twitter: #uxtx_tim timproffitt@gmail.com
He was our team’s CSS guy
Peter Karaganis peter.karaganis@gmail.com
He led our content translation effort
James Porter jamesporter@gmail.com
The other IT guy who is likewise changing to development. He did more cable-pushing while I was helpdesk.
Brett Stinson email@brettstinson.com
Another team member, though we didn’t interact as much, due to proximity.
Amed Subhani asubhani@gmail.com
Charismatic, and passionate about India cuisine. Introduced us to chanachur. I’m hooked.
