In April 2011 will open the first coworking space in Rosario and our team will be working there permanently. The project is called Njambre and was started by Federico Seineldin.

At PlusGlobal, we started following the coworking movement long time ago. So much so, that we created Coworking Rosario, a website to incentivate te creation of coworking spaces in our town. In almost a year of activity we made several contacts with people interested in the subject and, slowly, we created a little community.

That’s why we are so excited about this project. It will be very interesting to see how Njambre evolves because it will concentrate people with different social, artistic, technical and business profiles.

I believe it’s important to pay attention to developers and programmers; sometimes they are leaved in a corner. In fact, I think we always should take a programmer to the meetings because they see something else; they are able to see The Matrix and know what’s possible to do and what not. As Pedro Panigazzi told us in a conversation “Programmers are the best at creativity, they are the people with the right idea about something if something is doable or not”. In general, when the programmers are included in the process from the very beginning, the final work is much better.

Words from Carlos Marchese and Lucio Monopolis, directors at Inima Interactive Agency, translated from an interview they gave to the podcast Biznexo.

When CakePHP release a new version, you just need to update your cake dir with the new files, and, most of the times, everything works properly. However, sometimes your testing cases will miss some bugs and they will get to production. So, we must go back to the previous cake’s version until the bug is solved. This rollback process could be a problem because replacing the cake core dir could take a couple of minutes and the bugs are still there.

First solution attempt

We can have several folders with the framework, one called cake with the current version (the one that will be used by our app) and some other folders with the previous versions, i.e. cake-1.2.5, cake-1.3.2, etc. So, each time you need to go back to a previous version, you just have to rename the folders.

This solution has its downsides

• To rename the directories is a manual task done outside the automated deployment process.
• The cake core is not a piece of code maintained by us and it’s usually left out of the app’s repository. Therefore, each time you modify the cake folder you have to let know the rest of the team so everybody work at the same conditions.
• We have to keep an eye on the .gitignore file in order to keep new versions of cake out of the version control repository.
• If someone makes a checkout of our app, he/she won’t find any information about the cake’s version needed to run the code.

Solution

We create the following folder structure

• app
• cakeversions
  • 1.2.5
    • cake
  • 1.3.2
    • cake

The cakeversion folder will contain every version of CakePHP that our app had needed at some time and it should be ignored by Git. The folders named cake inside each version folder are necessary because the framework requires that the core lays inside a directory called exactly cake.

The next step would be to edit the file app/webroot/index.php, so the app uses the new location. This line:

define('CAKE_CORE_INCLUDE_PATH', ROOT);

Sould be replaced by this one:

define('CAKE_CORE_INCLUDE_PATH', ROOT . DS . 'cakeversions' . DS . '1.3.6');

Now, whenever we need to change the version of cake, we only have to edit the number on this line. The file app/webroot/index.php is part of the Git repository, so the change of version will be implemented in production in the next deploy. Also, the rest of the team will have it updated in the next fetch or pull they perform.

To be a freelance have its own downsides and one of them is the isolation. We have few opportunities to spend time with real people with similar interests than us. That’s why it is important to assist to events that are at our reach.

The last couple of days we went to this event. It was a really good event, with top speakers and interesting contents.

We had ours doubts about “wasting” two days of work into this event, but we are really happy we did it. We met with friends and customers that we don’t see face to face very often and we met new nice people.

If you are a freelance or business owner and you don’t use to go to events because you don’t want to waste time, think again, maybe you are wasting good opportunities.

Checking twitter today I saw this

This Book helps you to move into the Digital era of awesomeness. Download it for free: http://bit.ly/4R9rth

Then I clicked the link and went to the site to download the book, but, for my surprise, they ask me to pay the download with a tweet. What? Yes, pay with a tweet!

www.paywithatweet.com is a service where you can release products for free (a video, ebook, mp3 file, WordPress theme…) but asking people to write something in twitter before getting the prize. You can configure the promotional message and when the user wants the content he or she is connected with the twitter API and the text is automatically posted into his account.

Users can decide if they want to pay with a tweet on Twitter or with a post on their Facebook wall.

Update:
Google put a download link into every font, so this post is a little useless now.

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Google Font Directory is a service from Google that allow us to use special typographies in our web developments, free and easily. However, many graphic designers work with Photoshop (or some similar app) and they need the font installed locally at the computer.
Here you have the steps to install a font from Google on Windows
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