The Lab

DesignProjectX

A site about learning by doing

It started out as a live build of a Symphony site during An Event Apart, while listening to Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer, and many other fascinating people. Symphony Ensembles have been a fascination for me since the Symphony 2.0 beta releases, as they serve as blank slates and starting points for many of my experiments. Over time, I came to become involved in the role of helping to maintain the Export Ensemble extension, in the absence of the original developer of the extension, Alistair Kearney. The DesignProjectX ensemble was intended as a set of tutorials for newcomers to Symphony and XSLT.

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Updating the Piano Sonata Ensemble

I have been using the Piano Sonata ensemble for my personal blog. It needs updating: the site is still running on Symphony 2.0.6 and the content hasn’t been updated for quite a while.

Updating the Symphony Core

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Transparency in Development

In these days of collaborative, open source development, it makes sense to be transparent in the process of building software, so that users can know whether to trust a product and invest time in learning about, using and sharing the product with others.

In the past, design agencies have been known as environments where open source software development was not a priority, where secrecy, bourne out of a desire to build proprietary products that could be sold to customers, was, more often than not, the goal of the effort.

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