We’ve written 6 blog posts about Technology. View all topics »
At Happy Cog, we work on a sprint-based cadence. Designers and developers are allocated to open projects for a specific number of hours in each sprint, and we try to keep our team members planned up to 6 months into the future. Priorities, allocations, and assignments always change during that timeframe, but having a baseline plan in place helps us forecast hiring needs and prepare early for larger engagements.
Tech leadership is a mystery to many. As one racks up years of experience as a developer, there’s often an assumption that one must eventually move into tech leadership to continue to grow. And while this may be true, given the structure and hierarchy of the company you work for, the jump from individual contributor to tech leader isn’t always smooth. The two roles have some crossover in skills, but each also requires its own unique set of skills to get the job done as well.
We are constantly improving our approach to code. We build it. We break it. We love it. We hate it. And sometimes we blow it all up and start from scratch. If you caught @alliwagner’s swansong article about our starter files, you can recognize the value in years of iteration. But that doesn’t stop with just code. We’re constantly iterating on process, workflow, content strategy, etc. You name it, we’re always looking for ways to improve it. Nothing is ever set in stone. And the same goes for some of the less glamorous (depending on who you ask) tasks like… how do we put these things on the web for people to see?
Happy Cog is a content company. It’s the thread through all of our projects, regardless of industry, and always has been. We connect people and ideas. It’s in our DNA. When TEDxPhiladelphia reached out to us, we knew this was an opportunity we wanted to explore.
Deploying a website to a web server is hard. Not “It’ll take some extra time” hard or “We’ll need some help” hard. It’s “Get a whiteboard and plan out the thing A Beautiful Mind-style” hard. It’s easy to look at your code, look at your server, and just drag/drop files to production. It’s a lot more difficult to set up an automated system that will do that for you.
At Happy Cog, we work in a variety of technical situations, and our deployment strategies must be extensible enough to suit each and every need. We deploy to Windows servers and to *nix servers. In some situations, we deploy code as well as content. We deploy PHP websites on some servers and Ruby web workers on others.
If you’ve surfed the web, you’ve likely stumbled upon adult content or some reference to it. For the purpose of this article, I’d like to ignore the content shown on adult sites in favor of the content type, video, which makes these sites relevant to hosting and hosting issues. Adult content can be traced back to the early 1980s (when dial-up bulletin board systems served all the illicit content), so it’s safe to say it has been a part of the internet from the start. Neither Happy Cog nor Happy Cog Hosting work with sites that serve or publish adult content, but wherever you stand on the morality of porn, it is enlightening to consider the role it has played in shaping standards for online commerce and the way hosting providers do their jobs.
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