I’ve let WishCraze sleep for a very long time – perhaps too long.

I was talking with Topher about code repositories a while back and it made me realize that I didn’t quite understand their worth. I decided that I had a small web server of my own to play with and I might as well use it to familiarize myself with these processes that professional coders and developers use.

I set up Subversion that night. I configured it and got it working the next day.

Soon thereafter I was talking with a web developer my employer had recently brought in to work with us. He seemed lost in our world of little redundancy and no test environment. It made me realize how necessary and practical a test environment is. I thought, “do I have a server, or do I have a server?”

Then I reconfigured that server to provide me a test environment for all my various web development projects.

I first tackled setting up a test environment for WishCraze. It wasn’t easy. I had to rewrite a few things so they would work on multiple domains. I got it working though, and I was quite please with myself.

But rather than move on to another project and set up a new test environment, I decided to keep moving in the direction I was going. I had just gotten through refreshing myself on the structure of all my old code and decided to put it to use. I tweaked functions, trimmed excess code, and even rewrote functions in newly-learned efficient ways. Then I updated my live server, and it just worked.

I love my test environment.

I can ignore new error messages when there are more important things to do. I can try out new things without worrying about how it will be received. I can pretty much break everything apart, and build it up again. I can do all this without it ever effecting the real users on the live site.

This is a wonderful thing. Pretty soon I might try and get some actual users.

Filed under: The Winter Sun