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The Charon Sheet: A Facelift
About damn time, really. The old site was brown and more brown, combined with a ginormous font file resulting in some terrible behavior. I shall say no more. Those dark times are past. I’ve been working on the redesign for a while, and I hate that it took so long, but I’m pretty happy with the results. Still kept the dark feel, but moved away from the monochrome look.
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Beginner Developer: Where to Start?
I have a friend who’s looking to become a marketable developer fairly quickly, but is essentially trying to go from zero to hero. Despite starting a project in Python to randomize wedding slideshows, he’s never really done development, nor does he understand its core concepts (classes vs. objects, for instance). He kinda just needs a job, plus the ability to make useful tools for himself. Folks are telling him Java and *.NET, and I (mostly) agree for the simple purposes of 1) easy desktop or web development, and 2) using keyword-heavy languages to reinforce programming concepts. Not strong reasons, no. If he just wanted a job, I’d recommend UI development.…
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eTapestry API: Recurring Donations
I spent long enough trying to puzzle out whether I should use Recurring Gifts vs. Recurring Gift Schedules in the eTapestry API that I figured it was worth a short post. The goal was to handle recurring donations. Every month, Suzy wants to donate $10 to Cool NPO. It’s not a pledge, in that she’s not dedicating herself to $120 for one year. Just $10/month. (Forever! Bwua-ha-ha!)
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Blackbaud Merchant Services: No Sandbox Account
A word to anyone doing an eTapestry API integration for a client who uses Blackbaud Merchant Services: you may have an eTapestry sandbox, but you don’t (and can’t) get a BMS sandbox account. So how do developers test their API interactions? According to the BMS account rep I spoke to, they do it on the live system. With live credit cards. From the get-go.
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Brain Twist: .NET MVC 3, Entity Framework 4.1, and TDD
Talk about taking a large bite. In the interests of pushing my .NET knowledge, I began migrating the Geist character sheet project that I’d started in Django to .NET MVC 3. I hadn’t done MVC in .NET since MVC 1 was beta’d, but hey, MVC is MVC is MVC. Right? So in the interests of making things more interesting and more testable, I decided to dive into the Entity Framework 4. My beginning read of POJOs in Action, along with my previous experience with .netTears–I mean, .netTiers–had me generally familiar with the concepts of entities, contexts, and repositories. Kicker is, POJOs is just a book (and one I’ve barely dived…