Max Manders

It's the end of another year and a new one is just around the corner, so it's time to post my personal review of 2012. It's been a fun and exciting year and I'm looking forward to that continuing in to 2013.

This post may prove to be controversial; it shouldn't! Can't we all just get along? Seriously. I know we as developers are all different, and have our own personal views on what makes us tick. Surely though, we can all agree on having one thing in common: we thrive on solving interesting and challenging problems, and solving them in an elegant and clean fashion.

The secret's out -- I'm leaving Maglabs. The last few years with Maglabs have been a blast, but the time's come for me take on new challenges. I wish my colleagues every success in the future, but I'm looking forward to the 24th of September, when I start my new roll with Cloudreach. I'll be joining the devops team, working with a wide range of platforms and languages helping our customers take advantage of cloud technologies, particularly with services offered by Amazon and Google. I've even started using a MacBook, and I'm reluctant to say I'm actually quite liking it - bet you never thought you'd hear me say that!

It's high time I that got up to speed on testing best practices. I've dabbled with Selenium, SimpleTest and PHPUnit, but not in any way comprehensively. I've read and thoroughly enjoyed @grmpyprogrammer's book, and you should too.

However, I don't have the opportunity to exercise these interests in my current job, so I've taken it upon myself to learn in my own time with a pet-project I'm working on.

I've been using Wordpress to maintain my blog since early 2007. I have absolutely no complaints about Wordpress; it's a fantastic blogging platform and CMS for users of all skill levels. However, I spend most of time at the command line, and use Vim as my text editor of choice. For those reasons, a trend I've seen among other developers of using Jekyll very much appeals to me.