Environmental Studies

Three cheers for misleading titles! Huzzah! Huzz--no? Fine.

This post has nothing to do with the study of the natural terrestrial environment. Instead, it's based on the first project in my grand web-design/programming self-education scheme: configuring the development and production environments for the workflow ahead. My intention is to keep the process as simple as possible from step to step and limit configurations and installations to what I will be using immediately. With that in mind, these are the objectives for Project 0.

• Set up a Debian VirtualBox
• Install and configure Git for version control
• Install and configure vim for coding
• Install and configure Apache, nginx and Lighttpd server softwares
• Install and configure PostgreSQL database software
• Configure a Debian VPS (I'll be using Digital Ocean)

Since my initial projects will focus on relatively simple web design and learning C, this is the extent of the preparation I need to undertake up front. I'll need to make 100% sure I'm comfortable with the basic technology trio of HTML/CSS/JS before I worry about wonderful-but-optional things like jQuery and Node. Same goes for programming: I want to take some time cutting my teeth on C before I touch Assembly, and some time learning tight and efficient coding habits before I move on to something more lax like Python. Along the way, through general usage, I'll naturally build up my comfort and proficiency with Git, vim, bash scripting, servers and SQL.

The next project, I've already decided, will be a single-page directory that points to all of my assorted projects. Eventually, this will be replaced with a proper portfolio, but for now it should be sufficient.

In other news, today's writing went really well, despite my frustrations throughout last week. I crushed the target word count in one hour, and that was with the occasional interruption. Yay!

Still learning,
~L