I saw this the other day when I loaded up the store – looks like a classic “CSS not loaded” view to me. Quitting and re-launching returned things to normal. I found this interesting because I remembered that iTunes didn’t use Webkit; however that seems to have changed.

A couple of weeks ago we shut down the Crowd Favorite office for a day and a half to do a migration from SVN to Git. This was not a small undertaking. We had nearly five years of code in a single SVN repository that was then broken out into literally hundreds of Git repositories.

The main reason for the change is to be able to support a branch driven development workflow (using Git Flow). We were already using this for newer projects (including some of our Open Source WordPress plugins that we host on GitHub), and we were seeing lots of areas where this approach would be a big improvement to our SVN workflows. We think it will especially pay dividends for our ongoing retainer clients.

With our ongoing clients we are commonly engaged in building new features and functionality while also needing to be able to make smaller changes (hotfixes) that are pushed up immediately. With Git it is easy for us to maintain development of more involved functionality in feature branches and still being able to push up quick changes as needed.

We’ve been following a modular development methodology for years, so we have a large number of libraries, plugins, etc. that are shared across various projects. Converting these from SVN externals to Git submodules was a good bit of busy work, but more importantly it required everyone to get comfortable with the difference between SVN externals and Git submodules. The biggest changes are that the submodules default to a detached head and don’t auto-update to the latest code in a branch. These are generally positives, but require changes to how you think about things. More on this in a future post.

We are using GitHub to host our Open Source projects, but we choose to host our own Git server for our private repositories. We are using Gitolite for repository management, GitPHP to provide a hackable web interface and we’re planning to use Gerrit for code reviews.

One of the other challenges was setting up a repository structure that we were happy with for our WordPress sites. We settled on the following:

/index.php
/local-config.php (unversioned – has machine specific settings)
/wp-config.php (define WP_CONTENT_DIR and WP_CONTENT_URL here)
/wp/ (WordPress core as a shallow Git submodule or SVN checkout)
/wp-content/ (plugins, themes, etc.)

This works quite nicely for simple and painless WordPress core upgrades, local development environments, and scriptable deployments. With a standardized structure, we’re also able to create scripts to automate the creation and data seeding of local development environments. We’re still working on the local dev set-up script, but I’m really excited about it. It should make it much easier for any developer on our team to quickly spin up a project and be able to contribute to it.

Does this sound like fun? We’re hiring! Come help us define and implement best practices that make developers effective; and work on interesting and challenging projects.

If you’re planning to apply for TechStars Boulder for this summer (2012), make sure you’ve got your application ready to go for the early application deadline in 2 weeks. It’s been amazing to see TechStars grow and thrive as it has. The experience offered to the teams and the quality of the mentors is remarkable; I highly recommend it.

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I was in Austin last week for a few days and took a few photos (all with the iPhone). It’s a very cool town; and a much different vibe without the SxSW craziness.

We have a shiny, new careers page on the Crowd Favorite website. For the first time, I think what we have up there pretty accurately reflects both what we’re looking for and what we offer. Our new approach is a little different than most jobs pages; it doesn’t list any jobs.

I’ve always struggled to write up the job descriptions we are hiring for. As I was trying to describe our current openings last week, I had a bit of an epiphany. The biggest reason I struggle to write up job descriptions is that we’re looking for certain kinds of people, not someone to fit into a specific position.

Instead of posting a bunch of individual designer or developer positions, we instead have a list of designer and developer skill sets. Everyone on our team has cross-functional skills and we consider this a real strength. For some reason it has taken until now for us to make our “hiring” page reflect this (instead of sticking to the more traditional listing of available positions).

At this time we’re looking for a few developers to join our team. Head on over and take a look. If you like what you see and think you’d be a good fit.

I’m very pleased that we have reached the point where we are hiring to work on internal product initiatives and to shore up our internal systems as well as to contribute to our WordPress consulting and custom development services.

Crowd Favorite is a little unique in that you have the opportunity to work on lots of diverse projects and cutting edge technology, but you don’t have the 60-80 hour work week that demanded by your typical startup.

If you care about building great things on the web – please be in touch.