Ghost

Confessions of a former Designosaur

Thu, 18 Oct 2018 07:03:47 GMT

Working in Higher Education comes with a lot of perks (when learning is valued, upgrading is easier). I’ve posted previously about developing my leadership and coaching skills and how that really let my interface and front-end design skills grow stale in the trade-off.

Retooling is necessary in any industry, but is incredibly amplified when working in the digital space. Gone are the days of a solo web developer (or “full-stack”, as the cool kids say…) handling all tasks in a project, at least with any quality. I can usually get by year-after-year by reading industry news and following small tool developments, but when I poked my head up this Fall to see where digital was headed, I was gobsmacked. I had a tonne of upgrading to do.

While I love my home city tremendously, our local market is primarily overrun with small freelancers who offer Wix and Squarespace templates or modify self-hosted WordPress - so finding local industry mentors that delve in modern web tools can prove challenging.

If you are feeling like I was, take a deep breath and know that everything is attainable. The interweb is a wonderful place for learning new skills, it can be tuition-free and is mostly expert-led. Heck, you can even study at some of the more revered schools, the price of entry being time and motivation.

I consider myself a multidisciplinary creative, but my primary background is User Experience Design and Visual Interaction Design - if you look at a skills roadmap, that puts me on the path of modern Front End Development, and wow has that ever changed!

As I was preoccupied exploring digital transformation, digital strategy and governance- developers were ditching monolith CMS, outdated infrastructure, and began focusing on a better editing experience, API-first development, JavaScript and static site generators. Discussions shifted away from LAMP-stack, caching and optimization and began to embrace REACT, Webpack, GraphQL and the JAMstack (with many embracing Facebook’s open source internal development tools ).

I was determined to come to terms with the degree of change by tuning into some great podcasts, I can’t recommend the Syntax Podcast with Wes Bos and Scott Tolinskienough. Together with Chris Coyier’s Shop Talk podcast, I was able to get quickly up to speed and in a place where I felt literate again.

Today I’m happily embracing modern JavaScript, the tech behind REACT-powered sites that happily consume content from whatever API publishes an end point, deployed in a serverless architecture. Through general acceptance of CSS Grid, I’m able to abandon the crutch of Bootstrap and Bulma - buzzwords have become concrete skills, and a sense of clam has returned to my résumé.

Knowing that I don’t have to hate on the limitations of WordPress or Drupal themes, and that most everything I want to include is just an API away - Dribbble, Instagram, Elastic Search, SendGrid, Mailchimp, Stripe is incredibly freeing.

I found the following resources to be the best of the bunch:

CSS Grid

Javascript ES6+

REACT

GraphQL

Headless CMS

Version Control

Local Development Environments

Web Host

I plan to continue experimenting with new tools and methods that will enhance my interface design skills, but one thing I’m particularly excited about is transferring what I’ve learned about React.js to REACT Native and up my game with native mobile development.

Are you on a skills upgrading journey? Leave me a comment below, I’d love to hear all about it.

Exploring 3D On the Cheap

Sat, 29 Sep 2018 10:00:00 GMT

I’m old, like - really old, ancient enough to have seen the original Toy Story movie in a physical theatre, with popcorn and tickets I’d paid for myself (back then Netflix was a service that mailed DVDs to your house, and the local Blockbuster was king).

While Woody and Buzz were nothing short of voodoo to me, the notion of an entirely computer-generated film was something that seemed about as likely as private space exploration or a planned mission to Mars.

Over time, the wizards at Pixar continued to blaze Hollywood trails with Monsters Inc. (the realism in Sully’s fur blew my mind), Finding Nemo (water animation was now a staple in Tinseltown) and Ratatouille - bringing believable human characters to the party.

With every technological advance I became increasingly sure that it was something out of my grasp. I was convinced you needed access to a giant farm of computers, bucket-loads of investment money, and a team of no less than twenty NASA / MIT engineers on your payroll if you wanted to produce anything remotely similar.

I’m happy to tell you that the world is now a very different place, and you can get similar results at home with free software, some skills upgrading, and a home computer suitable for running modern video games.

I started fooling around with 3D content creation with 3DS Max and Rhino in the late 90’s, when learning 3D meant downloading a questionable copy of 3DS Max from some back-alley site (there was no ”student version”), and spending hours reading forum posts by other nerds online. My attempts at anything noteworthy were limited to logo animation for a provincial lottery and a 3D product configurator for an international self-balancing scooter company. 3D wasn’t something I’d actively pursued, but it was always something I wished I could be better at, despite the learning curve and long rendering times associated with anything more than basic.

Then along came CAMP.

If you ever get the opportunity to attend Calgary’s CAMP Festival, go. It’s a two-day conference for digital media creators and artists, padded by workshops taught by industry giants. This year I attended a 3D character creation workshop (thanks to TELUS and their diversity scholarships for “out of area” artists) taught by Chris Dowsett, a local film director with a passion for self-directed learning. I left CAMP with a renewed interest in 3D as a medium - but the pain inflicted with software licenses was a total turn-off. Cinema 4D and Octane used in class would come with a hefty price tag, and because the adult version of me thinks software piracy is a little more than uncool - I’d have to leave my dimensional dreams on the shelf.

I had an interesting thought: what if I could take what was taught with commercial tools and apply them to open-source (free to install and use) alternatives, would they produce similar results? How big are the differences to learn? Is there an online community that could help answer my questions quickly?

The answer to my questions leads to a 3D tool called Blender, which was a very different animal than I’d remembered toying with in my early career.Blender is a 3D modeling and animation tool used by casual 3D enthusiasts from around the world.

The software is free to download, install and use - regardless of what you are using it for. It runs equally well on Mac, Windows, and Linux computers and as I found out, is more than capable at producing professional results (If you’ve seen the animated movie ”Next Gen” on Netflix, you’ve seen Blender in action). The Blender I’d remembered was plagued by a non-standard user interface, had a massive learning curve and really didn’t compare to more industry-accepted tools.

The latest version of Blender (2.8) is an experimental download (alpha) - but it’s what I’m using to learn and create with, and I’m really impressed. The stable version (2.79) has a bunch of tutorials out on YouTube and blog posts online, but the interface is still pretty clunky.Blender 2.8’s interface is easier to understand than previous versions, and its physically-based renderer (the part of the application that converts your working scene into a photo-realistic image) called Cycles creates stunningly-real imagery (with Blender’s principal shader, node editor, HDRI lighting and beautiful depth of field).

So far, I’ve been hacking around with Blender tutorials I’ve found online (I made a pretty sweet cupcake thanks to the robotic European accent of MrSorbias, set up a physically accurate photo-studio with some of Derek’s advice, and learned the ins and outs of HDRI lighting and the node editor with a Creative Shrimp named Gleb).

My original creations have been more focused on the rendering portion of Blender (the images you can push out of Cycles are worth a serious look). I’ve been generating the type of content you see splattered all over social feeds and VJ loops in an effort to farm insta-likes, and plan to do something more serious soon - but I’m having a blast and haven’t spent a cent.

My learning style is completely “monkey see, monkey do” so YouTube can be a sea knowledge with zero tuition costs. If you work in a similar fashion, here’s a list of curated resources I found to be the best of the bunch:

Will Blender be something I push past the hobby stage and incorporate into my daily routine? I think so, but not in the way I’d originally imagined.The majority of my work ends up in a web browser, and 3D on the web is looking a little like “Toy Story” did all those years ago. A few projects that have caught my eye are Three.js (a JavaScript library that brings 3D content into a web page via JSON), Augmented Reality content for Facebook and Snapchat, and rendering video content for motion graphics for my own video projects.

How about you? Is 3D something you’ve wanted to explore but felt restricted by costs or the learning curve? What resources do you use to help with your projects? I’d love to hear from you in the comments section below.

Coalbanks & Company

Sat, 29 Sep 2018 10:00:00 GMT

Above All: Local

The idea was clean and direct: Lift others in the community through art, environmental responsibility, and technology.

Driven by local pride and social awareness first, and profit second (if at all). It’s not the type of idea you pitch to corporate investors, because if you look too closely - the “business” model doesn’t scale, has small market capitalization, and isn’t easily transferrable - and that’s totally okay.

It Was Never About Business Anyway

Captial “B” business that is, sure we expressed our sense of local pride through the design and sale of custom goods, but we sourced our shirts through local thrift shops - paying full retail prices and hand-selecting each one for wear and its ability to accept ink. We reclaimed and recycled our source materials in an effort to reduce the textile footprint in the Lethbridge dump - creating points of discussion around the impact of fast fashion and the ugly side of materialism.

Coalbanks & Company is a side project our family created last year. My 30 year run as a graphic designer combined with our heart for community non-profit projects helped to launch local-centric apparel made from reclaimed materials and distributed through independent businesses in Lethbridge.

It’s About Our Story

Through our time spent at the Galt Museum & Archives, we unearthed more than enough history to help tell the Lethbridge (formerly Coal Banks) story. From illegal trade of “Bug Juice” by Montana Whiskey Traders for Buffalo hides, the establishment of trade lines via the railway to the mining of coal seams on the banks of the Milk River - there is an abundance of material to reinterpret as modern brand material and help reignite the imaginations those who may be from here, but never stopped to listen to the echoes of a time long-forgotten.

Names like Healey, Hamilton, Potts, Magrath, Lethbridge, Stafford and others - aren’t just street names, but a signal that Lethbridge history is as colourful, dangerous and exciting as anything Hollywood produces.

Armed with a dusty trade-school background of paper print production, I set up a traditional silk screen press in our garage and created a few designs before settling on the typography for the original “Coalbanks & Company” tee. It was well received at local retailers and festival markets and I’m pretty sure we bought every plain black, white or grey t-shirt donated to MCC, Value Village or Salvation Army over the Summer months.

We adopted Instagram to help shine a light on our new venture - and quickly grew to 800 local subscribers in three months. Lethbridgian pride was communicated through our hats and tees without hesitation, and it was a great test run. As local artisans, we skipped the headaches that can come with anything business related and used the Winter to research more local stories - eager to unveil new art tied heavily to place and people that shaped our buildings, neighborhoods and industry.

This Summer we’ll unveil more Coalbanks & Company apparel with a slight pivot, we’re adding content creation and social media support to independent business, non-profits or anyone else dedicated to elevating Lethbridge and the people that define it. We saw great traction with our social media efforts last year, and can’t wait to share it.

Look for Coalbanks & Company apparel at Stoketown Cafe, in the heart of Lethbridge - year round.

Mobile Workspaces in YQL

Mon, 24 Sep 2018 10:00:00 GMT

It’s an exciting time for Lethbridge’s creative community as our city begins to embrace workspaces that have become in the norm in both Calgary and Edmonton.

Central coffee spaces like Stoketown and Sonder are seemingly designed for the laptop-loitering crowd, and adding to the buzz is Jonny Bean’s 13 Street gentrification.

While freelancers in the city typically set up shop at home, meetings are usually arranged at client locations or local coffee shops, so meeting privately or distraction-free can be an everyday challenge.

This Fall, Lethbridge welcomes two new projects in the downtown core aim to add beautiful spaces aimed at mobile and coworking arrangements. Existing options like The Port YQL (located in the old De Jourdan’s photography studio) or Tecconnect (Economic Development Lethbridge’s startup-centric space) are joined by Mortar & Brick (Arts & Event Space, located near Big John’s Books) & the Hive (coworking space - above Bread, Milk & Honey) - now open.

In addition to these private spaces for entrepreneurs, the City of Lethbridge has done a fantastic job of reinventing the downtown public library spaces: adding plentiful power, decent WiFi, computer access, self-service printing options, facility rental and free parking.

Recently a designer friend called me seeking advice on a workshop venue, I finally had more options than the usual suspects - Galt Museum, CASA, or commercial hotel & restaurant links. Dwell Urban Venue and Mortar & Brick are two beautiful options with a historic arts-vibe that I happily recommended for a TELUS Storyhive event.

After searching through directories online, I occurred to me that there wasn’t a curated list of resources online for those seeking space - so here’s my incomplete list of places to:

Have a lunch meeting

Jonny Bean Two long tables at the back of this coffee shop can be reserved for small groups, plenty of power and WiFi available (plus a fantastic team). Limited parking.
Sonder In a similar configuration to Jonny Bean (although smaller), tables near the back are better suited for a working lunch - bonus: locally produced Redengine Coffee.
Bread, Milk & Honey Longer group tables at the front combined with fantastic front-window seating - metered parking (easier with the mobile app).
Stoketown Cafe & Cure Lots of seating throughout, comfy benches, historic local decor and a private room that rents hourly.

Connect to WiFi and get to work

The Port YQL $200/mo. or $20/day to access this shared workspace between regular business hours (9am-5pm).
The Hive A reimagined space above Bread, Milk & Honey with great photos of the space on instagram - rates keep changing, check their mobile app (iOS), (Android) for current info.
Lethbridge Public Library $15/year for locals, public Wifi, long counters (with plenty of power), free parking and self-serve printing make this a no-nonsense choice to power-through the daily grind.

Host a meeting

Stoketown Cafe & Cure (Private Room) Connect with Glen, Stoketown owner and book his private space for meetings, coworking or small events. Glen’s so community-focused it’s hard not to be a cheerleader for this space.
Lethbridge Public Library While facility rental rates favour non-profits, the Crossings Branch on the Westend have modern classroom and meeting spaces with natural light that are worth considering.
CASA Great balcony or community meeting spaces, and great gallery shows to take in while on premise.
Tecconnect Beautiful space, very technology-centric and startup friendly - the location is remote, but the parking is free and plentiful.
Galt Museum Free parking, historical setting with modern amenities.

Hold an Event

Galt Museum Give your guests a taste of local history with this historic / modern facility combo and unmatched view of the Coulee below (and a bridge, there’s a bridge in Lethbridge).
CASA Great for screenings or dance facilities - this facility bleeds art from floor to floor.
Dwell Urban Venue Located above Jonny Bean in the Historic Burgman’s Hall, this venue lends itself to intimate music performances, yoga, photo shoots, receptions and more.
Mortar & Brick Beautiful gallery setting and downtown location, brick decor and (obviously) art throughout.

Do you have a favourite place to bang out some work in Lethbridge? Leave me a comment below and I’ll update this post to help future readers.

Getting Unstuck

Thu, 20 Sep 2018 10:00:00 GMT

This past Summer marked a decade of service at my day job - the notion of lifetime employment is a little mid-century, so marking 10 years was kind of a big deal for me!

It was also a giant wakeup call.

In the Summer of 2010, I walked away from a lifetime of agency work and freelancing to work for a small Canadian University. I felt I had made my mark in the digital media scene and was comforted by the songs of stability from the “real job” sirens. What I didn’t realize was the potential for skills to stagnate or switch direction altogether - a natural evolution from “doer” to “leader”.

Don’t get me wrong - as a lifetime-learner working in Higher Education has countless perks. I’ve been able to develop my coaching, strategy, people and leadership skills beyond what I might have gained in the private sector. The problem for me is that I miss the “doing”, and faced with the reality that “you can’t do it all” - I had to choose between roles: so I chose to explore being a better leader vs. competing with the new breed of designer/developer unicorns our industry had been churning out.

A major shake-up at work called for a retooling of our team. We had invested heavily in an open-source content management system that worked great for large-scale web development needs but lost its lustre when compared to some of the newer kids on the block. Leaner, more modern CMS tools with fancy things like mobile interfaces, deep social media integration, fantastic page-building tools, and mature features made our open source, enterprise CMS appear dated, worn out and potentially, the wrong choice.

An opportunity exists in every crisis - so I leveraged our need to create more nimble, relevant marketing-based websites as an excuse to get back in the game. I explored new tools in my off hours and built a slew of personal projects to see what stuck.Along the way, I discovered new methods of building websites and tools that I hadn’t paid serious attention to while in management mode. If you’re in a similar situation, I hope some, or all of this list gives you a bit of a boost if you’re feeling stuck like I was:

You might not need a MacBook Pro anymoreApple’s hardware used to be the de facto standard for web development - a perfect mix of the Unix terminal and niche applications meant paying the Apple tax was mandatory if you were at all serious about development. Not so anymore - with the advent of container-based tools like Docker you can spin up a local development machine OS, configuration and dependencies that match my project 100%, gone are the days of “whelp, it works on my machine”, teams can easily change up environments with simple terminal commands without polluting their local machine with project dependencies (Ruby, Python, PHP, Composer, Drupal, Wordpress, Let’s Encrypt and more - all ready to rock in just a few keystrokes). It’s all kinds of amazing, and it’s made the biggest impact on my development operations plan overall.
Visual Learner? Look beyond YouTubeImagine following a video tutorial, pausing it and being able to reach into the screen and hack on the presenter’s code - experimenting with the output and then carrying on right where you left off. That’s the premise of a new instructional development site called Scrimba. Take it for a spin, it’s how I brushed up on Bootstrap and got my head around Bulma (It’s also why I started talking about Typescript, D3.js, Vue, React and GraphQL).
Microsoft makes a Really Good Code Editor (seriously!)Wait. What? Yup, it’s true VS Code is an open source code editor (IDE) that is super-extensible and has a creepy/neat feature Microsoft calls Intellisense, that helps code-complete your syntax in a pretty non-obtrusive way. Add-ons for Docker, PHP, Twig, Sass, and Node are readily available, and the integrated terminal (I use Zsh, blinged-out with Oh My Zsh) saves me a tonne of time.
Linux is a lot more Friendly Linux on the desktop used to be a badge of honour for geeks who basked in a crappy graphical interface and lack of commercial software alternatives - not so anymore. I recently tested POP OS, an Ubuntu-based distro tuned for coders, scientists and other people that bash on keyboards daily, and it really is a viable alternative to the Windows / Mac OS machines. Running Docker, VS Code (or Atom), Blender, GIMP, Inkscape, and other creative tools is a cinch, and they work just a nicely as their paid-for counterparts. Got a spare laptop lying around that doesn’t meet the Docker requirements for Windows? Tired of the whacky shared-volume slowdowns of Mac OS? Put Bionic Beaver on it, and get happy!
Javascript is kind of a Big DealI’m not talking about JQuery here - Javascript is all grown up and ready for college on the server-side, and it’s blazingly fast. Frameworks like VUE or REACT (Angular too!) give traditional web development frameworks a serious run for the money and help shift your skills into the mobile application space too. This blog is running on Ghost - built in Node.js - it’s insanely simple and fast, goodbye Wordpress shared-hosting shenanigans!
Shared hosting is for SuckersI got sucked into the promise of cheap domain names and easy shared hosting management that accompanied GoDaddy’s famous Superbowl ads, and I’ll admit to using their managed Wordpress hosting service in the past - but I have seen the light, and it’s not here. Cloud-based hosting from services like Digital Ocean, Amazon Lightsail or Linode are incredibly cheaper, photons faster and miles more stable than the usual Cpanel-induced-cruft offered by Dreamhost, HostGator or other bottom-feeders. The catch? You’ll need to administer the machine yourself, which is out of the reach of most generalists. If your applications are primarily PHP-based, using a service like serverpilot.io is the best of both worlds - check out their integration with Digital Ocean in particular (their documentation is amazing) - A++
Move over Sketch, Adobe’s on your heels One of the major excuses for staying on Mac OS was the support for niche applications that were only available on Apple’s sacred platform. Sketch (a prototyping tool which arguably replaced Adobe Photoshop as the standard design app) was only available in Mac OS, with no competitor in sight. Adobe has been steadily gaining ground with Adobe XD - it’s cross-platform, can open sketch files and keeps getting better by the month. Linux users can open Sketch files with Gravit Designer.
Everyone can use a little CLIEmbracing the terminal allowed me access to some of the more powerful features of Docker (Docker Compose anyone?). I used to think that a terminal-based workflow was for the uber-elite (Linux fans? Same team), but then I started to embrace Docker, Git, Composer and other dev tools that just work better from the command line. Try it, learn the basics - a whole new world opens up, I promise.
Forking and Versioning - Sanity SaversHaving concentrated on more front-end development and interface design, versioning your code with a tool like GIT didn’t make much sense to me. Through some of the GUI tools like Github Desktop and Git Kraken, the intimidation factor is a lot lower, and nothing feels better than knowing you can fork your code, try something stupid and feel comfortable that you can roll back all (or some) of it with a few keystrokes. It’s like a giant “undo” button (that was easy).
There’s a Kinder, Gentler, World beyond WordPressEven though I’m paying attention to the new Gutenberg editor coming to WordPress, I love how the industry has questioned its own sanity and rolled back the web to a simpler time - ah the good ‘old flat-file CMS - everything old is new again - or is it? I started migrating WordPress projects to an open-source, flat-file alternative called Grav. All the modern development tools, none of the sour SQL-injection aftertaste. If you’ve been looking at a simpler, easier to understand and deploy CMS - take a serious look at Grav, I’m pretty impressed with what they can cobble together without a database humming in the background.

If you’re a student or have access to post-secondary discounts - try some of these services with Github’s backpack promo program. Credits for services like Github (obviously), Digital Ocean and more will help ease the pain of trying out something new.

Have your skills felt stagnant? What types of opportunities have you made use of to keep thing sharp? I’d love to hear your feedback!

Wordpress? We're on a Break

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Web Designers love Wordpress

It’s a sterotype I know, but one that’s deserving of mention. A large chunk of web designers I know actively build small projects in a content management system called WordPress. It comes in many forms (from self-hosted, license-free installs to a subscription-based hosted platform) and designers love it for a its non-technical installation, beautiful user interface and the sheer number of “free” ways WordPress can be extended to make it do all sorts of wonderful things.

A Run for the Money

Our industry is experiencing a shift away from hiring web help to build small business sites to a very DIY “hands on” approach. Subscription services like Wix and Squarespace have tried to eliminate the technical hurdles that site owners may have experienced in the past trying to do it themeselves by offering a generic set of pre-designed websites and features that allow for visual “page builder” customization of page layout and content. Is there an impact of cheaply available services like these? I feel the days of a web designer moonlighting as a web developer are gone.

There is little value to hiring out a project that can be comfortably replicated by anyone comfortable enough to use Gmail, and it’s the thinning of the herd - “drag and drop” posers should feel threatend.

Back to Basics

In the early days, WordPress showed up as a phenomenal blogging platform. It’s incredible popularity spawned a huge community that supported and extended it into the content management system it is today. That popularity has also hurt more often than helped. Today’s WordPress is a bloated, slow, tough to develop web content management system that rivals Drupal in its complexity. Its vulnerability to attacks keep site owners spending way too much time monitoring updates to its various bits instead of doing what matters - creating phenomenal content and services online. I recently had to parachute in to fix a WordPress powered site for an organization I volunteer for. The day-to-day site maintenance had been largely ignored and a series of plugins exposed security holes that compromised the website, having it serve spam to site visitors and leverage the hosting provider as a spam service (it seems the server’s uptime was largey spent serving Cialis advertisements, the irony isn’t lost on me). It was this period of 6 hours spent troubleshooting and removing a hack that WordPress and I fell out of love. I was sick of creative design choices limited by the predetermined layouts of a WYSIWYG layout plugin, bored of vetting and customizing yet another developer’s conflicting plugin CSS, and downright upset with the limitations of what WordPress had become.

Adding Value

If the traditional method of hiring web help to customize WordPress is dead in the water, how can designers adapt without bailing on an unprofitable sector and moving on to print or video? Do you happily install page builders to give your clients a private page builder experience? I recently found out the answer is simple. Dead simple.

New Boss? Same as the Old Boss

While I was busy following the hand-holding world of WordPress, web designers and developers were busy rethinking front-end development. New tools and techniques like task runners, package managers, CSS compilers and pattern libraries were quietly creeping up and replacing the old ways of doing things and I was out of the loop. I made it my mission to get back in the game and get up to speed - happily knocking out responsive web layouts with the help of a few battle-tested frameworks as a fresh start - with the new methods of creating and customizing web projects well in hand. Web design had become fun again, and generating static interfaces and learning new template languages like TWIG and Mustache had me hopeful that I wasn’t out of the game, I had simply become complacent by following a product instaed of an industry. I had replaced MAMP with Docker, CSS with SASS and made new friends with names like Yeoman, Grunt, Node and a tonne of others. I had my new front-end skills up to code but was still stuck on a way to build and deliver pages without the bloat, overhead and security holes of WordPress.

Flatten those files!

New tools and techniques made web design and front-end development fun again - working in static HTML, Javascript, Mustache and CSS were extensions of things I’d learned and loved in the beginning - but the thought of porting my interface work to Drupal or WordPress was like bursting party ballons, a quick reminder that the party was over and it was business as usual.

And then I (Re)discovered the Flat File

At a recent event in Nashville I had the opportunity to talk to other web teams about my WordPress woes. As a Drupal-centered event, developers were quick to slam WordPress - but rather than extole the virtues of Drupal as an alternative - they dug deeper into what type of site I was building, and why WordPress and Drupal both poor choices. The conversation moved from “tool wars” to tools fit for purpose. Drupal is a great content management system for large websites with many users and a tonne of content to manage. WordPress is definitley prettier, but doesn’t scale in the same way. The type of websites I was after were small in scale, more of what a small business owener would be after with tools like Wix or Squarespace - but with all the creative freedom of original web design and development vs. shoehorning specifications into predetermined themes and layout tools.

Enter Grav CMS

Gravity CMS or “Grav” is a simple, file-based content updating tool that allows users to edit content without a database and with very simple technical requirements. Using modern web technologies, its primary purpose is performance (and wow is it fast). Freed from its reliance on a database to generate its pages, Grav is a little more secure when compared to WordPress as SQL-injection attacks aren’t a thing. My favourite part about Grav CMS is its templating and content type creation - everything is a mix of YAML and TWIG, relying on markdown for content formatting, stuff that’s really easy for a web designer to grasp and extend, and it doesn’t lock you into a series of templates or themes to work within, you can happily port your static HTML to Grav super easily - so if its Bootstrap you’re working with, Foundation, or Grav’s own framework, getting up to speed is quick, simple and painless. If your project is based around a single-page website with managed sections, a small site without heavy search requirements or reliance on constantly changing content - Grav is a simple solution that gives you the freedom of full customization, simple content management for your users, and a platform that simplifies the hard stuff while making the easy stuff a joy to use again.

Grav’s community plugin support, excellent documentation and lack of an install process. Does it replace WordPress for small websites? For me, the answer is “Yup!” and what about Drupal - for the big stuff? “Nope, don’t be silly.”

Will every project I created choose Grav in the future? I think I’ve learned my lesson by getting caught up in the mania of brand-loyalty around tools, I’m much more concerned about exploring the right tools for the job - which is why this blog is being served with Ghost, but I’ll save that one for a future post :-)

A Developer's Dream Machine

Wed, 09 May 2018 10:00:00 GMT

A Little Backstory

When I first got into web development, Linux was readily making the transition from server to the desktop and a few brave souls I knew readily converted their machines to be their “development daily drivers”. Of course this was great for working on things usually found on the server-side (Apache, MySQL, Postgres, etc.) but became a nightmare to use lesser-then office suites and basic media playback was a whole other brand of hell.

Today and most of the web developers I run into are found happily hiding behind the Apple logo on shiny metal laptops working in “virtual offices” (read: Coffee Shops). It’s no secret why most web developers choose Apple hardware to setup shop - the hardware is solid (albeit heavily overpriced), the warranty is sound, and you can happily dual-boot it to Microsoft Windows if you need to experience life on the other side. The Mac OS is closely related to Linux, and the majority of things that need a bash shell run happily on the Mac.

The biggest drawback? The financial outlay for low performing hardware.

Something Old, Something New

A couple months ago I replaced my laptop with the intent of building a portable development machine. I had a DELL XPS 13” ultrabook, but its pitiful 4GB of RAM didn’t have an upgrade path - and I was starting to use Docker more and more. It was time for something new.

Realizing that I didn’t have the budget to go the Apple route this time ‘round, I started looking at lesser known alternatives. I had been toying with products from Xiaomi (a well known Chinese brand not sold in North America), known for their build quality and low price points. I’d been suitably impressed with Xiaomi’s budget fitness tracker (it outperformed a FitBit at 4x the price), and my RedMi phone was feature-packed for its paltry $160 CDN outlay. Xiaomi had just ventured into the laptop market with a Windows 10-powered ultrabook heavily influenced by the MacBook air hardware series, but more squared in appearance and less visual branding. I held my breath and ordered the Xiaomi Mi Air 13” laptop from Gear Best, an online source for Chinese-only hardware.

When the laptop arrived I quickly wiped the Chinese-licensed Windows OS that was preinstalled on it and replaced it with my Windows key - to my surprise Windows update had all the drivers required for the hardware, and the conversion was a cinch. The machine was equipped with a 250GB solid state drive, with a second open slot for expansion - I added an additional 500GB drive to it adding up to an impressive 750GB storage for a 13” laptop, room to breathe!

I used this Windows 10 configuration for a couple months but soon missed having the Mac OS terminal at my bekon. Powershell and some of the Microsoft tools just weren’t for me - luckily Microsoft added Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and allowed me to intall and access Ubuntu Linux and Windows simultaneously on the same machine. While this was initially quite hard to wrap my head around, it eventually felt quite natural to run Docker in Windows and access the containers via my Ubuntu Linux user, on the same machine, at the same time (and without much of the typical sluggishness associated with a VM).

I paid $700USD for the Xiaomi Mi Air 13” laptop initially, and while I felt like I was getting twice the performance for the money - I couldnt’ shake being homesick for Mac OS - this is how I discovered the whacky world that is today’s Hackintosh.

Important Considerations

Mac OS is licensed only for Apple-supplied hardware, but it runs quite nicely on hardware that closely mirrors the original contents of Apple’s fruit crate. What is your Mac but an Intel processor, and a series of generic components that can be made to recognize Mac OS? As a purely academic exercise I explored if my hardware could eagerly accept an Apple operating system in addition to the native Windows and weirdly emulated Ubuntu installs I had on my main drive.

After about a month of digging and reading myriad forum posts I had a general approach in mind to add High Sierra to the technology mix on my portable development machine. I figured a Windows / Linux / Mac OS combo would be ready for pretty much any web development task thrown at it, with compatibility a long lost concern and Docker containers ready for anything it wouldn’t do natively. Through a bunch of “almost boot” efforts I was able to make a create a special USB key prepped for the Xiaomi hardware and I was up and running with an “almost” factory feel (and polished dual-boot screen).

The experience is far from perfect however - bluetooth doesn’t work at all (so there goes Apple Airdrop and wireless mice support) and wireless networking works via additional hardware, a USB network adaptor that replaces the internal network components (the chipset isn’t compatible with Mac OS).

The result is a great proof-of-concept though, three operating systems and Docker containers handle most any local development task without littering your machine with dependancies and OS-level incompatibiliy. You can work on Microsoft’s Umbraco CMS in IIS and SQL Server in the morning, a Sketch UI prototype in the afternoon, and round out the day working on a Ghost install with NGINX, MySQL and Node all runing smoothly (and quickly!).

In my performance testing, the hardware runs equivalent or faster than a 13” Macbook Pro (running around $1,499 USD) - at half the cost, and that’s the true winner here, I don’t personally recommend you install Mac OS on non-Apple hardware - you never truly “own” Mac OS, only license it, and you agreed to certain things in the End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) although if you’re like millions of others, you’ve never really read it.

Back to the Future

Mon, 09 Apr 2018 10:00:00 GMT

Hi! I’m Michael Warf, and well - I wear a lot of hats.

I’m a University IT Manager in the day, but after hours I invest in family and creative pursuits as much as I can possibly fit into the remaining daylight.

In Lethbridge you’ll catch me around town with my family, filming a vlog, guzzling coffee, staring vacantly at my phone uttering “uh huh, riiight, yeah…of course I’m listening” to someone who actually needs my attention, running a silk-screen press, or deep-diving into new technology tools eager to keep on top of trends.

While that description doesn’t even scratch the surface of who I am, it’ll do for today - and fits where this blog is headed.

Blogging? Um…it’s 2018

Right? Blogging is a pretty 2010 kinda thing to do - gone are the days of people furiously documenting their life online with the hopes of picking up an advertiser or two (with secret hopes of quitting the rat race and blogging from their virtual office in Thailand.)

So why (re)start a blog in 2018?

I have a whole other set of reasons for blogging, and they overlap nicely with why I create and share video content on YouTube.

I’m devoted to lifelong learning
I love to share what I learn with others

So with that in mind I’ve kickstarted my blog back to life on a new (to me) platform called Ghost, which I host on a server at Digital Ocean. Now those two techy things might not interest you - so I’ll save the details for a future post clearly marked tech, so you can opt in or run away at your leisure.

I recently marked 10 years of service at my day job and it got me thinking about what skills I’d developed, gained or focused on this past decade? It didn’t take me long to realize I had grown comfortable where technology was concerned - sure I had worked hard on people and leadership skills (I lead a development team), but the stuff that really got me interested in digital communications as a career was rusty!

The biggest attraction to working with web technologies is that it constantly changes. Relearning your skills every 6 months isn’t for everyone, but as someone who welcomes new methods & tools, this kind of change is exciting!

While I kept current on the industry news, I’d let the new kids concentrate on the more innovative stuff and it was starting to show. So when we lost our team’s designer at work - I rolled up my sleeves at started to figure it all out again, and it’s a nerd-rush for sure!

So while I geek out over things like Docker, Pattern Lab, Node, Grunt, SASS, Atom , GitHub, Craft, Grav & Ghost I plan to write about the experience here - hoping it’ll reignite a spark in another webby-type person and relaunch a passion or two!

Welcome aboard! I promise it won’t all be tech nonsense - it can’t be - work / life balance just won’t let it, and Summer is almost upon us.

The mountains are calling, and I must go.