Catch22 Behind the Scenes – Technology

I don’t see any camera crews making a documentary about Catch22 Marketing in the immediate future, so for now you’ll have to settle for reading about what makes Catch22 tick.

Like any company, we depend upon technology, processes, and most importantly, people. Ultimately, technology and processes reflect the habits and abilities of those using them. Hire smart people, and when you can’t, hire yourself.

However, just talking about myself would probably be braggadocious, like using big words, so I’ll stick to the technology and processes we use to get the job done.

Technology – My System

I’ve been a long time Windows user, coming from an IT background where Windows remains king. However, I’m open to new adventures, so when I joined Catch22, it was off to the Apple store for a 15 inch MacBook Pro.

Contrary to what a Mac enthusiast might tell you, there is a learning curve to understanding OSX, especially if you’re a Windows power user. For example, running multiple screens seems to go against the very spirit of the OS, so naturally I have three. I also want to quickly resize windows on the screen by clicking. Helpfully, Mac introduced auto resizing in one of their latest software updates.

I’ve been very impressed with the performance of my MacBook Pro, and have learned the nuances that make it a great system to work on. The Core i7 and 16 GB of RAM handle multiple VMware Fusion instances of Windows 7 and Ubuntu without a hiccup, making this laptop feel more like a desktop.

It also looks fantastic. Sometimes I don’t want to use it but just put it on a pedestal somewhere.

Software

Much of what we run now is SaaS, or “cloud” based. However, there are things that still work better local. A couple of the tools that I use:

VMware Fusion:

As mentioned earlier, I use this hypervisor for running test instances. Every website we create needs to load properly on many different devices and operating systems, and testing each one is faster on one machine.
Coda:

This is a great web IDE for OSX, which has some great features, including integrated file management for local, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, or even S3. It has support for Git or Subversion as well.
Srutiny5:

This handy app makes deep diving into analyzing html on the web quick and easy. You can find broken links, missing pictures, spelling and grammar mistakes, and even track uptime and schedule scans.
SourceTree:

This is a Git & Mercurial client, and it makes tracking code changes with a team easy. It’s just nice to have a visual view of the process and makes code review easier.