Going Back…To Old Methods

I’ve been teaching a very close friend how to program recently.  As we got close to beginning a full-fledged project (which we’ll be starting to show off sometime in February), he gave me a request.  For the most part, I’ve been showing him how to use N2F Yverdon through the lessons because of a pre-existing foundation in PHP syntax.  His request was to go back to the way I “did things before” so he could see where N2F was born.

My immediate response was a simple look of horror and sharp intake of breath.  Get rid of my beloved framework?  Go back to complete manual sanitization for data?  Use mysql_query() calls!?

After I was recovered from the shock, I realized that this is a great opportunity (or excuse) to revisit those old methods and remind myself of the very things that I hope to make unnecessary with N2F.  I agreed to the challenge, and my grin seemed to frighten my friend thoroughly.

To say it will be interesting doing this is probably an understatement, but I’ll be sure to keep you all up to date on the project’s progress.  Has anyone else done something similar?

 

- Andy

1 Update in 1 Year, 2 Months?

As I was putting the finishing touches on the new N2F website yesterday, I happened to notice that the release date for Yverdon v0.1 was November 2nd, 2008.  That’s over 1 year and 2 months for us to release a ‘minor’ revision to the framework.  Quite frankly, I was embarrassed at first, that’s a long time for an update that doesn’t really cover a whole slew of changes.

After that initial moment however, I did stop and think about what all has gone into producing this framework.  When Matt, Chris and I originally set out to build this framework from the things we’d learned using an old framework I had built years earlier, it wasn’t something that we were able to piece together over night.  If my memory serves me (which it usually doesn’t), we spent upwards of 8 months just talking about the way the system would work and what things we wanted to accomplish.

With that in mind, I started looking back on the past year and two months that it has taken us to build v0.2.  We’ve spent a lot of time and energy testing out the different pieces of the framework, and we know we still haven’t hit everything.  After all the testing was done (or in progress), we then had to sit down and go through the process of discussing what changes needed and what we wanted to accomplish.  We actually went through this cycle 2 to 3 times before finally getting things to the point where we could release them.

All in all, it’s been a long and busy year.  We hope that the v0.2 release reflects that to those of you who end up using the system.  I promise we’ll try to keep the release of v0.3 under the 2 year mark.  ;)

 

- Andy

New Zibings Inc. Blog

As of today, Zibings Incorporated is now entering the blogosphere.  We have created a blog for ourselves using Google’s Blogger service at http://blog.zibings.com/.  We’ll make sure updates are posted every other week, so be sure to check it out!

 

- Andy