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So I have several pet projects. Let’s be honest most developers do. How I define a pet project is maybe slightly different to how most would though. To me a pet project is one that isn’t important (As the majority of the time a pet project never is) but to me they are ones that are useful for a particular reason. Either because they make good ways to learn (say) an open source framework, such as Symfony 2 [symfony.com] or Zend2 [zend.com] Framework. Over the next few weeks, I am going to detail my pet projects, and talk people through how I go about create them, and learning about (for example) entities in Drupal 7, or working with Symfony2 Framework “For the first time” (More accurately the first time in a few months, and I need to refamiliarise myself with it) I’m not necessarily going to document and publish every step, this is not going to be a “How to” (I’ve tried doing those before, usually with amusing results due to my ability to procrastinate for England), But I will publish access to my log book (When I’ve typed up my handwritten one, probably published via Microsoft OneNote). The code I produce for my pet projects will be publically available on my BitBucket repository [bitbucket.org], and possibly on github [github.com].
So I have a number of pet projects I like to use. These include:
- Multilingual Projects
- “Housing” website (Think RightMove or Zoopla, but maybe for a specific estate agent/realator or private landlord)
- Tutorial Course registration system
These are projects that I have worked on over the years with actual clients, but I have anonymised names and code I produce (Often completely rewriting them in entirely different frameworks which are incompatible with the originally used system). The one I used to learn entities on Drupal 7 was the Housing website (Originally apartments for rent, but I expanded it to all types of housing as it better taught entities and their use cases within Drupal’s definition). The code produced may not be of the greatest quality, nor is it definitely production ready. The code I put up on bitbucket etc is designed partially as portfolio pieces for both myself and my company (Where stated), and partially as “playground” pieces. It is not designed to be cloned and used in production (Although if you do wish to use them in production I am flattered). All my code is GPL v2 [gnu.org] unless otherwise stated.