brett-reid.com

Active Ice has been a part of my life for the past 4.5 years. Mike, George and I (equal partners) started Active Ice with the intention of creating a web studio which focussed on quality – in both design and development. Over the years we created some very cool sites and some not so cool (client influenced) but in the whole it was a great experience. I learnt a lot about what to do and what not to do in business and the importance of having the same goal. George left Active Ice in May last year and in October last year I made the decision to leave too. My reasons were plentiful and I won’t bore you with all of them but working 4.5 years non-stop nights and through weekends takes it’s toll.

I had various interviews including ones at Prezence, Sythasite and Stonewall+ but the opportunity to help grow/nurture the development department at Stonewall+ caught my eye – specifically the line “where your role will be to pioneer STONEWALL’s open-source technology”.

I started at Stonewall+ on the 2nd January as ‘Senior Developer’ and things are going very well. I have an intelligent team of guys who are keen to learn – can’t ask for more really. I’ve held a few meetings going over some development practises and am busy organising the internal environment (file servers/svn etc). I also got both Stonewall+ offices (CT + JHB) involved in coming up with a server naming convention – we settled on Simpsons characters which should be fun.

I am busy with my first project – I am learning/implementing Drupal as a solution for the site. Drupal is widely acclaimed to be the best written CMS out there and it just so happens to be in PHP/MySQL. The requirement was for a community site and so Drupal was a perfect match. I have been very impressed with Drupal so far – the learning curve is steep but well worth the time. You start to realise it’s more of a framework than just a CMS and can plug into just about anything, including Flash sites. I plan on putting together a short document to help developers get up to speed on Drupal quickly. I found there was literally thousands of tutorials and pages in the documentation and I think I have filtered them down to the best ones, screencasts included. Will post the site once it’s done.