TheLaughingHeart.org
Errol and Rochelle Strider’s The Laughing Heart Organization is a website I built and have mindfully-maintained and kept data-redundancies for, in my care, throughout a number-of-years totalling more time-in-aggregate, than any other. Though its code doesn’t weigh-in anywhere near the complexities of some of my industry authorships, Errol remains my most faithful web freelance client, and it’s always a delight to work with him and receive his spiritual wisdom-in-years while fulfilling his feature-requests…
When I created the site in 2008, I was still a classical violinist Performance Major at San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where I was in my second year of completing my Music degree, which I’d begun at Eastman School of Music @ University of Rochester, almost a decade earlier. Errol’s in his eighties, so it must also be noted that he loves and has a deep cultural appreciation for classical music. Since he’s a sage of life/the universe/everything, I’ve often done touchups+redeploys, simply for the free spiritual counsel, while we listen to string quartets together.
The site began as a modest WordPress, and though it left my developer-workshop once or twice throughout the years, due simply to my being too busy to tend to it, I eventually gave it a full, enterprise-grade release-management workflow and custom-themed architecture via its “Ballah Kaballah” Sage-based WordPress theme, using the Roots ecosystem, which via Trellis, provides a workflow for securely-automating the deployment of a WordPress via Ansible. Although some out there in WordPress-land may find Roots a “bloat solution” for simply spinning up and maintaining a WordPress, Roots Trellis is a tool designed to implement the 12-factor app methodology, for WordPress development.
As such, and since TheLaughingHeart certainly wasn’t my first WordPress, I thought I’d “do WordPress right” for a change, since Errol’s a time-honored contact, aside from just an altogether good human being with a good project with “Namaste” spirit. So, though maintaining f.e. Trellis Ansible Vault for protecting the site’s Secrets, and many other enterprise’y facets of the 501c3 non-profit org’s site-confs, I can confidently-state maintaining the thing definitely keeps my chops up as a dev when I have nothing else on my plate. That, and working with Errol keeps me human, which I think is very important in our tech discipline. Here’s to the Mensch, Errol and Rochelle Strider of The Laughing Heart. 🙏
