Coffee on the Keyboard

When I joined the SUMO team six months ago, the team was just starting a discussion of “where do we go from here?”  SUMO was built on a CMS called TikiWiki, and had diverged pretty significantly in two years. (David Tenser wrote a more detailed history if you’re interested.)

After a few months of talking and testing—and a few changes of direction—we’ve decided that SUMO will follow our colleagues on AMO and move to a custom web application, built on Django, a development framework in Python.

Why are we committing to such a dramatic new direction? Three major reasons. Continue reading

I’m not ashamed of it: I like Windows. I think the user experience is light-years ahead of Gnome and KDE. There’s nothing ostensibly wrong with OS X, but there are little usability differences and frankly switching isn’t worth the annoyance to me. That’s why I run Windows 7 on all three computers I use daily.

This is only a problem when I try to work on LAMP web applications. Sure, I could install XAMPP, but running Apache/PHP on Windows is really not close enough to a production environment. So I have two choices: I can dual-boot Linux and work in an OS—well, a window manager—I don’t like, or I can turn to virtual machines. Continue reading