2022
2022 in review: the year I adopted nothing
I did not add a single new tool to my stack in 2022. Same bundler, same CSS approach, same
framework versions. One new project, and it started from the same skeleton as the previou...
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2015
2015 in review: hand-written deploys, and my first PhpStorm licence
Very little front-end in my 2015. This was a year of servers: a PHP 5.6 migration across a
platform, wildcard certificates so everything could finally go to HTTPS, a search server...
2014
2014 in review: the year a build step appeared
Until this year my CSS workflow was: open the file, type CSS, save, refresh. On 10 October I
committed a Gulpfile.js for the first time, under a commit message that just says
"So...
2013
2013 in review: putting a framework next to the CMS
This was the year I stopped trying to make a content management system do things that are not
content management. In January I started a project on a PHP framework instead, and the...
2011
2011 in review: leaving Dreamweaver for a code editor
This is the year I stopped writing code that was mine, in two senses at once. In 2010 I had taken
a full-time job as lead developer at an agency, running a team of four, and I stay...
2009
2009 in review: nine sites, one codebase, and hosting as my problem too
There is what I built in 2009, and there is what I actually spent the days on, and the two barely
overlap.
What I built
2009 is the peak year for the strategy I started in 2008...
2008
2008 in review: writing my own framework, without calling it that
I launched nine small sites over this year and the next, and they are, to the file, the same
application. Same directory layout, same entry point, same config.php, same models/,...
2003
2003 in review: a stylesheet, and a platform instead of a page
I had been writing PHP for a while by 2003. What changed this year is what I pointed it at: my
first stylesheet, a database behind a site rather than beside it, and a platform that...