brew manager development blog

go brew some beer while I’m gone. Eventually i’ll have a tool to help you.

In the mean time, watch the watchmen teaser trailer. Make sure you’re sitting down and wearing pants you don’t care about.

I’ve been on vacation, and then sick and then going on vacation again. There won’t be any updates from me until the 30th or so. I’ll be doing ragbrai and concentrating on eating pie and drinking beer for the next week or so. Until I leave I need to get some stuff finished up at work. Hopefully when I get back Chris will have some layout stuff ready for me and I can get to work on getting that implemented.

Today I did the re factoring I was talking about in the last posts. It went well, and more importantly quickly. What I have now works much better and got rid of quite a bit of complexity. Functionality wise I’m ready to stick out there for folks to play with. I’m going to talk to Chris first and see how much of the look and feel we can implement in a few days before I do, mostly to make a better first impression. There is still quite a bit of navigation clunkiness that I’d like to get rid of. Even with the navigation issues, I’ve got recipe creation working from end to end and a reasonable amount of ingredients seeded into the database.

Something may popup soon….

I went camping next weekend so there was no progress over the last few days. That will hopefully change soon. I’m meeting with Chris tomorrow to discuss design and navigation, as well as whatever ideas he has for the site. I’m working away on getting the unit / function tests finished for all the code that is written before I do more feature work on the site. I’m down to one failing functional test. Hopefully I’ll get through that tonight.

I’ve gotten bugzilla installed. For the most part painless. The guys at dreamhost were nice enough to install a module for me. I tried myself but the cpan wrapper script, and just straight up make were getting killed. I think it was the memory/cpu cop. If anyone wants to install bugzilla at dreamhost the directions found on the dreamhost wiki are spot on. I’ve written a script that takes care of modifying the files they talk about and changing the permissions. If anyone wants it I’m happy to hand it over. I figure it makes upgrading less of a pain.

I’ve gotten the site to the point where a user can log in, and create recipes, search what recipes belong to them as well as everyone else. What a recipe is needs to get a little more fleshed out (adding fields). Due to family running around and merriment ( everyone should go to an Indian / Moroccan wedding at least once, way fun) I didn’t get as far as I’d have liked. Once I get the recipe fleshed out a bit I’ll post it to alpha.brewmanger.com (there will be an announcement when this happens, few days yet I suspect as work will be busy this week) and folks can start playing with it. At that point the site will be useful for storing recipes, but not much else.

After the recipe stuff is up I’ll tackle inventory as that seems to be the next logical step, and then the can I make this / what can I make with what I have functionality.

I’ve also had a friend volunteer to help with site design and the visual stuff. I’m pretty pumped because that isn’t my strong suit. The hope is that he can more or less draw me a picture and I can make it look like that. We will see how that goes depending on how his avaliablity is. The first thing I put up won’t have much beyond basic navigation and total page refreshes, substance over style