Design

I thought that this is a good motto to start the week out with. There’s a pretty cool back story on what inspired the design here.

I follow quite a few blogs of various people that make headlines and have a coding background. One person in particular that somehow made the list many moons ago that I have failed to remove is Leah Culver. I think it was her ties to the midwest and the fact that she seems to be putting her ass out there with Pownce (which has since had to close its doors).

In her latest post, she talks about writing a plugin for Django. If you are unfamiliar with django, it is a web framework written in python which loosely follows the model-view-controller design pattern (source).

As I’ve written before, the main engine that we are using to provision users on our Exchange system is Microsoft‘s Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC) framework.

I’ve had a few issues with it and various hoops that I have had to jump through. Many of which I have not had a chance to document on this blog. Those will hopefully come out in the coming months.

Today, I was dealing with a speed issue that we have been having in our customer portal that hits HMC. The page is pretty basic, it gives a listing of all the users, the name, login address, what package they are assigned and then some actions that can be taken on the user such as edit, delete, disable. This is all in house code that shows this information with calls being made to HMC to get the data.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of side work for friends and family putting together some low traffic ‘business card’ sites. I used to do a lot of custom programming for each of these where I would put up the site and then have a CMS on the back end so they could log in and update the content.

This worked out for a while and I had a pretty basic CMS built that I could plug in where needed. But, as with everything, the feature set that I needed kept growing and I was pretty short on time to implement the features that I needed.

Well done T-Mobile, well done! Will this video make me want to switch, not necessarily. But you’ve set your self apart from the rest of the phone carriers by having a clue about viral marketing.