HCPS Mobile Project – A Little History

I was recently inspired by a post in the Web Developers, Web Designers, Web Coding Google+ Community from +Ted Isaksson  to document a web development project from start to finish.  Although I have had a few projects between then and now, I haven’t really had any that I felt like documenting or any that I would have had the extra time.  It wasn’t until I saw a recent post  from the folks over at Jquery Mobile about the release of 1.3.0 beta that sparked an idea on a project that has been rolling around in my head for almost a year now.

There are two reasons I really want to do document this process.  The first reason is that I feel everyone can learn something from seeing how someone else does the same thing they do.  I do not consider myself an experienced web developer by any stretch of the means.  I have really only been seriously involved in web development for the past year.  That being said, I have learned a lot in that past year and hope that someone else who is just starting in this field might gain some knowledge from what I have learned.  It’s also nice to get feedback from other developers throughout the process, especially those with more experience.  I don’t like to reinvent the wheel and I am positive that my method of coding is probably not the cleanest most efficient route.  I am hoping to gain some insight into how to improve in these areas.  Most of my code will be available to view but due to the nature of the project, I will not be able to reveal everything. After all, a magician has to keep some tricks up his sleeve.  The second reason for documenting my development process is purely selfish.  A person can learn a lot by reflecting on their own work. Written reflection forces a person to focus on the details within the big picture.  I hope to find holes in my process, places where I am spending to much time and other areas where I am not spending enough.  Part of this process will be a learning experience. I will be challenging myself to incorporate some PHP and SQL which are not the normal languages I currently work with.  The project will be tested on my in-house test server (an old converted laptop running Ubuntu Server 12.04 and Apache2) but the final project will be housed on my work server once it is ready for release.  Each step of the project will be document here with links back to this blog from my Google+ profile and twitter.

Please feel free to follow along and contribute any thoughts as the process continues.