Wow, it's been nearly two months since my last post! Whoops! I'm still around, it's been a strange mix of quiet and hectic lately. Quiet in that we wrapped up our first PHP Zend project and got it out the door. Thus far it's worked pretty well other than the occasional completely unreproducible error message that we get emailed on, but that no one is actually indicating is being seen on their end. We did end up having to drop using Zend's internal SOAP stuff because the legacy app that was calling our SOAP was so finicky, it had to have things almost exactly like the old app. So we ended up having to break out of Zend and use NuSoap to get it to what they needed.
We've also been gearing up for our first actual major PHP app – rebuilding one of our biggest, and most important, applications, AgriLife People. Of course, one big part of that is going from ColdFusion to PHP, but we'll also be adding a lot of new functionality, doing a complete GUI redesign, etc. The latter is the driver behind the project, the conversion from ColdFusion to PHP is more of a "well, we're doing so much rebuild anyway, might as well do it now" kind of thing.
With that, we've been doing lots of meetings getting raw requirements and asking tons of questions to hammer out the details. This week we finally got to the point of being able to take all that information and turn it into a bulleted 10+ page initial requirements document breaking down everything the current system does and then listing the desired changes. Each bullet is 10-15 words of briefness (so hard for me!!). We still have yet more questions that came up just doing that!
And once our boss, who is also the main client (no pressure right LOL), has gone through and struck out anything or added stuff, we'll still need to make the project plan and fuller requirements which will include getting down to near pseudo-code level details. That thing is gonna be huge! We also already have a running list of stuff that will go into phase 2 and 3 point releases down the line. It's exciting but also really stressful as it is a huge undertaking and thus far, we have a very short deadline for it (IMHO) of end of January – which includes the 2 weeks off we get for Christmas break, Thanksgiving break, and still having to get all the requirements gathered.
I also haven't had much time to focus on my personal Zend project app or doing much of anything web dev wise in my personal life just to being so busy with other stuff. Really doing a push right now on my writing stuff while at the same time working on finally finishing up my kitchen renovation. Yes, the same one I started when I bought the house like 6 years ago 😛 So over the last month or so, I stripped off my attempt at "refacing" the bottom cabinets, then resanded them and have repainted them in a nice high-gloss white enamel.
I took the old door pulls and repainted them to a oil-rubbed bronze like finish. During that process, I discovered the black on those pulls was actually paint as well – and that underneath was bronze! But alas, the metal was tarnished to the point that even with several rounds of cleaning and polishing, I couldn't get them clean so ended up sticking to my painting plan. I also painted the hinges, which had been painted over on the doors by the previous owners. *doh* And I made a faux sink "drawer" to cover that gap that was above the sink.
At this point, the last part of the cabinet end of things is the upper cabinets. I have the doors off and the cabinets mostly emptied. I'm hoping that this weekend I can finish emptying them, get them clean, and get them painted. The project got delayed by my getting an upper respiratory infection (in the freaking summer??) and having a lingering cough that kept me mostly inactive for a few weeks.
Once the cabinets are done, then I can do the part I'm most excited about…put in floors!!! After deciding to go with laminate floors and a month of driving my sweetie nuts looking at dozens of options, I ended up driving to the closest Lumber Liquidators which is in Spring (about 80 miles/90 minutes away). After walking the showroom like 3 times, I decided on Kensington's Glacial Oak Poplar laminate floors. It's a "handscraped" style so it has nice texturing, it's 12 mm thick with an attached pad, and it's a nice light color to help light up my dark kitchen.
I wanted to paint the cabinets first (for obvious reasons), so once those are done, my sweetie will help me move the stove and fridge out of the room temporarily so I can lay down the new floors! Yay!! Hopefully over the next coming weeks, I will have some actually web-type stuff to talk about, but meanwhile, now you guys know I'm still around 😉
If you want to see more pics, check out my Flickr album which starts with my first demo way back in 2008 through my first refinish attempt when I did the bottom cabinets yellow through my current progress 🙂