Acquia U: The Fire-hose

Two weeks of Acquia U have gone by in the blink of an eye. The program's immersive style coupled with mountains of information has kept us on our toes and helped us to pick up lots of information at a very fast clip. There have been times that I've felt the rising water level of project deadlines and information overload, but the Acquia U team is doing a great job of distributing the load and generally exceeding expectations. We're rapidly learning new and effective strategies for time management and group collaboration, while concurrently onboarding with Acquia's infrastructure, products, and policies.

One of the threads of project deliverables over the past two weeks has been to develop an evolving personal website. The first week, we started out building a personal Drupal Gardens site. The second week, we each migrated our Gardens sites to Acquia's DevCloud. We then set up local sandboxes for syncing code, files, and databases across our local and development environments.

The program hasn't officially stepped into drush territory yet, but a couple of drush commands have proven to be incredible time-savers in managing and syncing across multiple environments. Using drush site aliases in conjunction with the drush-specific rsync and sql-sync commands simplifies the process of migrating files and databases (respectively) to executing two commands in the terminal. The code-base is managed via git (an amazing and powerful version control software). This is a robust, safe, and common workflow for developing websites. Look for a blog post soon detailing the steps to set this all up.

One of my new mantras: "The command line is your friend." There have been countless times especially over the past two weeks where the command line has done what would otherwise be tedious and/or time-consuming.

An anecdote I heard this week: "People who keep coming back despite the information fire-hose are those who succeed at Acquia."