Louis Landry: Big Easy art

Who are you and what do you do?

My favorite thing to do in the world is create. I was born and raised just outside of New Orleans and creativity has always been a strong trait of my family. My mother is an art teacher and my father is what most people would call a renaissance man. I’ve always been comfortable tinkering with things from fuel injection systems to home electronics to my mother’s art supplies when she wasn’t looking. Software programming is my current art and the Joomla! Platform is my current palette. The idea of building something new that I haven’t learned about yet is my passion and what drives me.

In the Joomla! world I am a development coordinator and architect for the Joomla! project. I am or in the past have been the principal of a number of small businesses in the Joomla! space that specialize in custom development and extensions. Through my company Webimagery I have done consulting work for various organizations from large enterprises such as eBay and MTV Networks to smaller publishing companies and other local organizations. I was a founder at JXtended where I helped design and build several Joomla extensions such JXtended Finder — the first and only search engine build completely for Joomla!.

What hardware are you using?

My current weapon of choice is a 15” MacBook Pro. When at the office I dock it to a Hannspree 28” monitor and the ever trendy Apple wireless keyboard and “Magic” mouse. This allows me to have the desktop feel when at the office but the mobility of having my entire system on the go. When I was making the decision on a laptop nearly 4 years ago I got the first generation MacBook Pro because at the time I just wasn’t convinced that Linux was quite ready for the Laptop. There were too many questions with hibernation and battery life for me to ignore. Since that first Mac I haven’t looked back. I still have a couple of older HP Slimline machines around with various flavors of Linux and FreeBSD on them. These are toys that I play with from time to time. If you were to look, there is a ton of software that I have written over the years when tinkering with one thing or another that lives on those machines and will likely never see the light of day.

And what software?

I do all my development in Eclipse or some variant of it. I have recently gotten a ZendStudio license and am still getting used to it. For now when writing PHP I am still in regular old Eclipse with the PHPEclipse plugin and Subclipse that I have been using for years. Similarly when I am playing with C++/QT I am in the QT variant of Eclipse. I have TextMate when I want to do simple file editing, but I find that it isn’t that common. I have gotten so comfortable with the tools that Eclipse provides I can’t imagine moving to anything else at this point!

As for the server side of things I use the Apache and PHP versions that ship with OSX Snow Leopard. I used to use MacPorts to get the latest versions of Apache and PHP... and even Lighttpd. That often turned into a hassle during upgrades and since Apple started shipping PHP 5.3 with the base operations system I haven’t looked back. My toy boxes have so many different combinations of web servers I couldn’t begin to describe. I really like to play with new things!

For browsers I am a Chrome guy for anything day to day... and still pull out Firefox when I need something specific. Chrome is fast, simple, and pretty. I love it.

What would be your dream setup?

My dream setup would be a newer version of what I already have with my MacBook Pro. Along with that I would like to be able to have it connect to a display wirelessly so I don’t have to always plug and unplug it every time I set it down. I can’t really say that I have a lot of computing needs that aren’t being met with my setup. So long as I get to play with it and discover new things I’m a happy guy.