So much has been happening that I don’t even have a chance to update it here fast enough. But just as a quick summary, I’ve been trying to update my skills by looking more into best interviewing practices, updating my resume, doing some practice code from 2 sites I found to be pretty neat:

https://www.freecodecamp.org
https://leetcode.com/

I’ve also looked into Laravel again as I am beginning to like the ease of use in that framework more and more. And as it so happens, there is also a CMS that’s based in Laravel, October CMS which I also looked into.  A few things I like immediately are:

• Ease of file structure navigation (in comparison to other CMS including WordPress)
• File editing can be easily done via code (files) or through their CMS interface.
• Quick to start up and get running
• Latest stable release is fairly recent 2016
• There are a lot more updates coming in the near future [“October Pond”, updating to the Laravel 5.5 framework]

Some things I dislike are:

• Some of the content is File based rather than Database based, so it’s not as easy to switch themes and expect to still see all the same content on your site (as in WordPress). [However, there are ways you can build/use the plugin system and make your content Database driven]
• Laravel 5.5 runs on PHP 7.0+ which means I’ll probably have to move from my PHP 5.x environments.

I’m considering redoing this site on that CMS and have a little more control over content, themes, and plugins but we’ll see.