Over the past semester, I’ve been working with Dr. Vallejos to build a website for Massachusetts HOSA. At the conclusion of my independent study project, I will be presenting my project to the Computer Science faculty and other CS students. In preparing for this presentation, I came to a couple of realizations about what I’ve learned from this experience.

While I certainly think that I have improved upon my technical skills in CSS and PHP, I think that what is perhaps more valuable is the immense amount of real-world project management experience that I have gained. This experience has already allowed me to build a better understanding of project requirements at work and for the software development capstone project with AMPATH Informatics. Being able to understand the requirements of stakeholders is essential to delivering a product that meets their expectations. Asking the right questions the first time will prevent having to reach out again and again for clarification of the requirements. People are generally very busy and they will not be available to answer your questions or provide you with information. Whether it is a customer, manager, or product owner, it is best not to waste other people’s time with comeback questions because of your own failure to fully consider the project’s requirements.

I also believe that I greatly improved my personal software development process throughout this project. Although it took a couple of mistakes for me to learn, I am thankful that I made these mistakes in a safe environment and lost nothing but a few hours of my time. I was initially pretty careless, making customization changes to the theme files directly on the web server itself, not backing up, and not tracking any of my changes. After losing all of my theme customizations by updating the theme, I decided to make some changes to this process. I implemented Git version control, allowing me to make and test changes locally before pushing to the actual website as well as tracking changes incrementally and allowing me to rollback to any revision, as desired. I also implemented automatic offsite backup in Google Drive, which runs weekly to ensure that even if I do mess something up, there’s always a working copy safely stored elsewhere.

I have always been an avid believer in learning through experience, and the MassHOSA website project has been a fantastic opportunity to learn through my experiences. Not only have I had the chance to both sharpen my technical skills and widen my skill set, I have gained invaluable experience managing a project and working with stakeholders on bringing an idea from the conceptual phase through to a working product.

From the blog CS@Worcester – ~/GeorgeMatthew/etc by gmatthew and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I am getting ready to deliver a website product that I have been working on for Massachusetts HOSA. Because I’ve been working on the development of the website for the past couple of months, I am familiar with where to find everything. Once the product is delivered, however, it will be updated and maintained by Massachusetts HOSA. While I would be perfectly happy to continue helping out with the website as needed, I would like to minimize the need for my involvement by making the website as self-sustaining as possible.

In previous blog posts, I already outlined the setup of automatic backups. This makes me feel much better about enabling automatic updates for the WordPress installation. With automatic upgrades enabled, the site will be kept secure and up to date as WordPress and plugin or theme developers release new versions. I would be weary of allowing automatic updates if I was unsure of whether or not there were current backups because of the possibility of an update breaking the site. Occasionally there are incompatibilities between different plugin/WordPress version combinations, or simply bugs in a release that could make the site unstable. In case of such a scenario, having a recent backup that can quickly be rolled back to is essential.

The second part of making the site self-sustaining is to write documentation for the use of this specific WordPress installation. While WordPress is already extremely well documented, this vast documentation can sometimes be difficult to navigate efficiently. I would like to pick and choose the essentials to include in a slimmed-down version of documentation to provide to MassHOSA as a guide for the maintenance and updating of the website. This documentation will include guides for use of the WordPress platform, use of the various plugins that are installed, and also references to the locations of various resources such as backups and styling files.

I am extremely thankful for the opportunities that working on this project has granted me. While I may have had some prior experience building WordPress websites, this was quite different. I got a much better idea of the various stages of a design project and experience working directly with stakeholders to turn specifications into a working, real-world implementation.

From the blog CS@Worcester – ~/GeorgeMatthew/etc by gmatthew and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

After meeting to discuss the current status of the website, there are only a few tasks that remain. Although I am still waiting on some of the design content such as images and social media links to be provided, I think that the website design will soon be wrapped up. Once this happens, the next step will be education and training on the use and maintenance of the site. This should not be too intense because of how intuitive WordPress is to use.

Part of this training will likely involve the transfer of the hosting off of my personal virtual server to a permanent host. While I do not mind hosting the site for the time being, I do not want to be responsible in the case that my server goes down. When using a well known hosting provider, you are paying for someone to take on this responsibility. I have prepared the site to be migrated, and I do not anticipate any issues with migration. WordPress is rather portable, not requiring much more than a few directories and a small database.

One item that still needed to be addressed was the size of the font used on the website. Although it appeared appropriate on my screen, it was difficult to read from a distance on higher resolution monitors. While I had tested the website in a few different browsers and even on my mobile phone, none of these allowed me to view the site as if I were using a higher resolution monitor. During the meeting, when viewing the site at a higher resolution, the text appeared to be “zoomed out” and was difficult to read in some of the lower contrast areas of the page.

The next thing that I will be looking at for the MassHOSA project is QuickBase. I am familiar with the platform because of an internship where I am currently auditing and validating user access to QuickBase. Despite this familiarity, there may be a few obstacles to making the desired changes. After a quick inspection of the application, many of the features required to make the desired changes to the application are blocked due to the QuickBase tier in use. I will be looking for workarounds and discussing the potential solutions during my next meeting.

From the blog CS@Worcester – ~/GeorgeMatthew/etc by gmatthew and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Now that I’ve got a functional website built for the MassHOSA project, it is time to start preparing to move it the website to its permanent home. Development has been straightforward partly because it has taken place while the server has been living on my personal virtual private server. With full SSH access to the development server, it was much easier to make server-side tweaks to various environment settings. Many of these tweaks had more to do with my server being misconfigured than with WordPress, however. I am hopeful that the permanent hosting environment that is selected will require minimal modifications. Many of the hosts that we’ve looked at, for example, have environments tailored specifically for WordPress hosting.

To begin preparing, I copied the entire WordPress directory to my local machine using SCP. While this took some time, I wanted to be sure that everything was transferred and remained intact. I did not necessarily trust that FTP was up to the task, as I have had some problems with file integrity after using FTP for large-scale file transfers. While there may have been many other contributing factors, I thought I would try SCP instead this time, at least for the downloading of the website files to my local computer. FTP may be the only option for uploading the files to the new host, as many shared hosts do not allow SSH access.

The next step of the preparation process was to export and download the contents of the database associated with the installation. Choosing how I export the tables is important, because of the limited privileges that may be available for importing the data on the new host. To ensure that I would be able to import the tables on the new host, I used the account used by WordPress to access the database, and exported all of the tables in the database. This way, even if the new host allows only one database, I will be able to migrate all of the necessary tables and simply update the wp-config file to point to the correct database.

Thankfully, if anything goes wrong during the setup of the site on the new host, I have the working installation on my virtual server to fall back on while working things out. I hope that I have not overlooked anything and that the migration will be straightforward and painless.

From the blog CS@Worcester – ~/GeorgeMatthew/etc by gmatthew and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I am a strong believer in not being afraid to fail. Failure is how we learn and improve. If you are not facing failure, then perhaps you are not pushing yourself hard enough. It is difficult to grow as an individual and certainly as a software developer if you are not pushing your personal limits. Pushing the limits of what you are comfortable with will inevitably mean failure at one point or another. It is important to know that failure is perfectly acceptable, and learning from your failures helps you to grow.

I was relieved to learn that the ideas presented in Hoover and Oshineye’s Apprenticeship Patterns aligned so well with my personal thinking. The Breakable Toys pattern specifically mentions not being afraid to fail, and gives advice on creating a safe environment to try things. Because it would be dangerous and risky to do your experimenting at work, Hoover and Oshineye recommend creating a safe space. What you create in your safe space should be relevant to your work as an apprentice, and similar in toolset but smaller in scope.

While I have made quite a few of my own programs just messing around to gain familiarity with a particular subject or idea, the specific nature of these programs makes them lose relevance quickly. They are abandoned shortly after they serve their purpose of familiarizing me with an idea. I like the solution presented by Hoover and Oshineye to create software such as a wiki, game, blog, or IRC client. These types of software will not lose their relevancy, as they can be continuously used and further developed. New features can be added that not only serve practical uses, but allow for new opportunities for learning and practice.

Creating software for personal use is far less risky than playing around on company time. If you do it right, you may even get something useful in addition to the knowledge you gain from your failures. I am looking forward to attempting to develop one of the suggested tools suggested in the Breakable Toys pattern. While I do not think I will be writing any software that lives up to Torvald’s breakable toy, I can certainly appreciate the value in trying, and also in failing.

From the blog CS@Worcester – ~/GeorgeMatthew/etc by gmatthew and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

As part of my continued efforts to not lose all of my hard work, I’m implementing tools to help me track changes and have decided to use version control to do it. I’ve chosen to use Git because of my relative familiarity with the tool.

For a bit of background, my web server is running Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS and the latest version of WordPress at the time of this writing, version 4.9.4. Because GitLab allows for free private repositories and the nature of the project makes a public repository undesirable, it was chosen over GitHub. One thing to note about this setup is that I have full shell access to the server, allowing me to install programs and edit properties as necessary to get things setup. When the website is eventually migrated to its permanent hosting location, some changes may be necessary to the following setup to accommodate the server implementation. Many shared hosting providers do not allow shell access, and a new strategy would need to be considered in this case.

I started the setup by performing a bit of housekeeping with

sudo apt-get update

and then performed the initial Git installation with

sudo apt-get install git

I then performed the usual Git setup, uploading my SSH user’s key to GitLab and setting my username/email with

git config –global user.name “Your Name”

git config –global user.email “youremail@domain.com“

After cd’ing to the directory of the website files, I issued the command

git remote add origin git@gitlab.com:MassHOSA/masshosa-website.git

An important step here is to make sure that no sensitive files are tracked by Git. I did this by adding a .gitignore with the following:

#————————

#  Main ignored items

#————————

/../wp-config.php

/wp-config.php

.maintenance

versionpress.maintenance

/.htaccess

/web.config

/wp-content/*

!/wp-content/db.php

!/wp-content/index.php

!/wp-content/plugins/

/wp-content/plugins/versionpress/

!/wp-content/mu-plugins/

!/wp-content/themes/

!/wp-content/languages/

!/wp-content/uploads/

!/wp-content/vpdb/

#————————

#  Log files

#————————

*.log

error_log

access_log

#————————

#  OS Files

#————————

.DS_Store

.DS_Store?

._*

.Spotlight-V100

.Trashes

ehthumbs.db

*[Tt]humbs.db

*.Trashes

at this point it was safe to issue a

git add .

and commit with

git commit -m “Initial commit”

and finally push changes with

git push –set-upstream origin master

And that’s all there was to it. I’m now tracking all of the changes that I’m making to theme and plugin files. These are the only files that I really care about reverting and recovering changes that I’ve made. Everything else is backed up regularly using Updraft.

From the blog CS@Worcester – ~/GeorgeMatthew/etc by gmatthew and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

As part of my continued efforts to not lose all of my hard work, I’m implementing tools to help me track changes and have decided to use version control to do it. I’ve chosen to use Git because of my relative familiarity with the tool.

For a bit of background, my web server is running Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS and the latest version of WordPress at the time of this writing, version 4.9.4. Because GitLab allows for free private repositories and the nature of the project makes a public repository undesirable, it was chosen over GitHub. One thing to note about this setup is that I have full shell access to the server, allowing me to install programs and edit properties as necessary to get things setup. When the website is eventually migrated to its permanent hosting location, some changes may be necessary to the following setup to accommodate the server implementation. Many shared hosting providers do not allow shell access, and a new strategy would need to be considered in this case.

I started the setup by performing a bit of housekeeping with

sudo apt-get update

and then performed the initial Git installation with

sudo apt-get install git

I then performed the usual Git setup, uploading my SSH user’s key to GitLab and setting my username/email with

git config –global user.name “Your Name”

git config –global user.email “youremail@domain.com“

After cd’ing to the directory of the website files, I issued the command

git remote add origin git@gitlab.com:MassHOSA/masshosa-website.git

An important step here is to make sure that no sensitive files are tracked by Git. I did this by adding a .gitignore with the following:

#————————

#  Main ignored items

#————————

/../wp-config.php

/wp-config.php

.maintenance

versionpress.maintenance

/.htaccess

/web.config

/wp-content/*

!/wp-content/db.php

!/wp-content/index.php

!/wp-content/plugins/

/wp-content/plugins/versionpress/

!/wp-content/mu-plugins/

!/wp-content/themes/

!/wp-content/languages/

!/wp-content/uploads/

!/wp-content/vpdb/

#————————

#  Log files

#————————

*.log

error_log

access_log

#————————

#  OS Files

#————————

.DS_Store

.DS_Store?

._*

.Spotlight-V100

.Trashes

ehthumbs.db

*[Tt]humbs.db

*.Trashes

at this point it was safe to issue a

git add .

and commit with

git commit -m “Initial commit”

and finally push changes with

git push –set-upstream origin master

And that’s all there was to it. I’m now tracking all of the changes that I’m making to theme and plugin files. These are the only files that I really care about reverting and recovering changes that I’ve made. Everything else is backed up regularly using Updraft.

From the blog CS@Worcester – ~/GeorgeMatthew/etc by gmatthew and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.