techie/geek must haves
October 14, 2008 - 9:13am
What area do you want to go in?
I think this depends on what area you want to get into and how that ties into your gifts.
When I think of web specific stuff the 3 areas I see are designer, developer, programmer. The designer deals with the look or user interface. The developer puts the pieces together to make the final product. The programmer writes the software that powers the site.
One person might do all 3 of these but it's more likely to be just 2 parts of this. It's rare where someone has the ability to do all 3 well.
While I can give you a few ideas now I'll tease you with a new project I have coming up. I'm going to tackle this topic from the angle of a web engineer. The concentratoin will be on the development and programming aspects with a lot of User Experience/User Interface focus that is separate from creating sweet designs.
So, a few tools that I love...
- OS X/Linux/BSD/Unix Terminal. A unix style terminal window lets me do so much. Many of the most powerful tools can only be run from there.
- Eclipse. I tend to use Eclipse PDT for it's PHP development. Eclipse is a free IDE. You can add onto it to handle just about any programming language or feature.
- GIMP. Most people don't need full on photoshop. GIMP works fine in it's place if you are not doing design work.
- Textwrangler. It's an OS X text editor for development. Has some nice features and it's free.
- IRC Client. There are a lot of them. The best development conversations to learn from happen in IRC.
- Testing framework. It could be simpletest (built into drupal 7), selenium, or a number of others. They help you find the stupid bugs that get passed you if used right. Happened to me just last night with my drupal development. Found an oops bugs from it.
Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com
November 5, 2008 - 3:41am
oh
Hi Matt,
Thanks for the info and sorry for taking so long to respond. I keep forgetting how broad the subject of "web stuff" can be . Ha ha.
Right now, design is what I should concentrate on. Of course, I'll look into the programmer and developer part.
I just need to dive it into Drupal and see which area I'm really good at.
Thanks again!
Shane
Hello Rob and Matt!!
I understand ya'll stick to what you know best, and that's great. But since you guys are so AMAZING at what you do, I thought it would be interesting to hear ya'll talk about the hardware in your lives....Ok, that sounds a bit weird. Ha ha. I think it would be a neat show idea for ya'll to talk about your usb drives, ext hard drives, and other geek gadgets that make your lives/business/ministry run smoother. Obviously, wild and crazy geek gadgets are no substitute for being a good web designer, but it would be interesting to hear about yours.
Drupal and photoshop are a given, but I'm also curious about what software makes things easier for you.... And I'd like to know what do you guys recommend a person should learn who really wants to get with Web stuff? Now, you've probably gone over all of this in the last 100 episodes, but I'd be neat to have it all in one show or segment.
Thanks a bunch!!!!
Shane