God at work
March 30, 2015I was asked to come back to HTB to work on their 'God at Work' website as senior developer, working with their permanent front-end developer/site-builder to get the site scoped and built. This project, whilst not the most challenging of projects, gave me a really good chance to concrete some skills I have been learning more over the past year. These are things like building a custom entity fast and reliably, alongside Agile work process', and release process'.
DevOps
Surprisingly, one of my first tasks was a much more general task, and was to get their large multisite install to play nicely with SSL. Due to the way the sites are built and release using Puppet, we integrated it into this so that a single configuration change could be made, which trickles all the way down through apach and htaccess to set the various headers and redirects required.
Site Architecture
The initial back-end build of this site also relied on all new content and views being setup so the themer could just jump in and theme. This meant all the planning, such as for display suite, needed to happen early on with IA diagrams to help break down the content for each type, and the various states it would appear in. This made theming a lot quicker, as there was no jumping around to add/edit content, just classes and css.
Module Builder
There were a lot of modules to build to do various things from talking to webservices and pulling in Instagram assets, to setting up custom entities so we can manage content in a more standard way than just making another node-type.
Scrum Master
At first, there wasn't a strong ticketing structure ready for the new project, so this needed to be implemented and it's usage ensured within JIRA. This allowed us to see the overall scope of the project, making everyone aware of the scale, and progress. Although the most useful part was that it showed us lots of work was being done, but testing was slowing sign-off ultimately.