What I use developing and prototyping ideas
Ben Welsh over at palewire.com asked in a comment what I used to get my “development shop rolling.” If by “shop” you mean “my desk” here’s what I use:
- A chunk of junk HP box given up for dead and awaiting execution because of a corrupted Windows install.
- Post hard drive nuking, a nice clean Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) Linux install.
- Python 2.5
- Apache 2
- Mod-Python
- MySQL 5.0
- Django (the trunk version)
- A static IP address and a domain on the internal company network.
I have a love/hate relationship with GUIs, so I use/don’t use them schizophrenically. I use MySQL’s Query Browser and admin tools mostly to check and make sure my Python imports are working. For model/view/template work, I almost exclusively use a text editor, mostly gedit, the text editor found in most Gnome installs. I’m trying to learn Vi for fixing things on remote servers, but lord is that byzantine.
That’s it. That’s my development box. Since it’s wholly unsupported by our company IT shop, I have complete control over it. I break it as I please, and I’m left to fix it when I do.
The parts out of what I just wrote that I think are important for encouraging innovation in the newsroom:
- A completely open source box — we haven’t spent a dime on anything.
- You don’t need top of the line hardware: re-using old equipment works great and gets approved faster and doesn’t require money your shop doesn’t have right now.
- I have total authority on the box, installing, changing, tweaking what I please without asking for permission.
- I can learn, fail, delete everything and start over again on this box, and no one knows, cares or is affected by it.
And one last thing: I included the static IP address and the domain on the internal network for a reason: demos matter.
I can sit in an editor’s office and talk all day long about this great idea I have for this that and the other thing, and they’ll nod politely and say it sounds great and have no feel for what I’m talking about. But, if I can show them what I’m talking about, it makes a huge difference. Time and time again with PolitiFact, people thought the idea was cool but they were less than enthusiastic. When we actually showed it to them, they came out of their seats. It was real. They could click around.
Got an idea burning up your brain? Find an old box. Turning it into a web server is stunningly easy with Ubuntu. Hack something together and show it. A demo gets a lot farther than a memo.
