Eugene Fedorenko is Designing, Writing, Reading, and Traveling

Writing (sometimes)

15 years

In the early 2000s, an acquaintance mentioned that he’s been working in an IT department of a large organization for 10 years, starting right after college. My only reaction was a horrified “Fuck this!” The idea of a long career in the same place was something from a generation of my grandfather, who was building the USSR’s biggest warships for 35 years. I was skeptical of traditional employment and instead freelanced for American and European companies that outsourced design and development to Ukraine.

Soon after that conversation, I was introduced to Chris Nagele from Wildbit. We started working on a project, then on another one, and another one…

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Migrating from Dropbox to iCloud Drive

I've been getting annoyed with Dropbox lately. First, this summer they redesigned the app to act as a "productivity launchpad" instead of a simple synced folder. I have nothing against this direction by itself, but this is not what I signed up for. Second, I've been paying both for Dropbox to store my files and iCloud to store my photos, so it felt a little redundant and wasteful. And last but not least, I had some privacy concerns as it's yet another company having access to all my documents and files. The fewer companies and apps can reach them the better.

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Camaraderie in a remote design team →

Published at Wildbit

A few weeks ago on our annual Wildbit retreat we had a group discussion on what works and what doesn’t in our internal process. A few developers mentioned the same problem — a lack of shoptalk with their peers when working remotely. They came up with different solutions, from participating in local meetups to weekly lunches with other developers, but it reminded me of a time when the same problem was very acute in our design team.

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How we chose Craft CMS for our product websites →

Published at Wildbit

A little over a year ago, we had 4 marketing websites built with 4 different frameworks or CMSs, and it was a mess. As the team had grown, publishing became a nightmare — nobody really knew how to access or update any specific page or a part of a website. We had some work to do. Within a few months we researched, picked, and migrated to a single CMS; moved marketing websites to a single hosting platform from multiple scattered services; and created a library of modules that is reused on all of them. This massive project isn’t completely over yet, but enough time passed both to confirm that we made a right choice and to see some of its issues.

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Adding fingerprints to assets with Gulp and DeployBot →

Published at DeployBot

While working on a new Wildbit website last week I spent some time tweaking its performance. Caching CSS, JS, and images for a long period of time is one of the most important things you can do to create a fast loading website. It’s relatively easy to configure on most web servers, but comes with a downside — you’ll need to invalidate cached files whenever they change.

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Introducing a new Beanstalk dashboard →

Published at Beanstalk

Today we’re happy to introduce an enhanced and more useful dashboard. Our team uses Beanstalk every day and we felt like the current version needed some love and some key features. And you — our customers — told us the same thing.

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Deploy Craft CMS to DigitalOcean →

Published at DeployBot

This guide explains how to launch a website powered by Craft CMS with a proper development environment and workflow behind it. You’ll set up a local development environment, put Craft theme and config files under version control with Git, create and configure a new DigitalOcean droplet, install Craft on it, and then deploy your theme and configs to a live website with DeployBot.

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Building assets with Grunt or Gulp during deployment →

Published at DeployBot

This guide explains how to compile website assets with Build Tools during deployment. We’ll use Grunt as an example, but everything below can be applied to Gulp or any other Node-based task runner as well.

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Design update: choosing a server type →

Published at DeployBot

Have you ever avoided some parts of your website or application just because they are not up to your standards or just got old and dusty? Well, I certainly have! Lately I’ve been looking for excuses to not add any more servers to environments just because choosing a server type was kinda embarrassing:

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Introducing a new dashboard at DeployBot →

Published at DeployBot

Today we’re introducing a new dashboard that provides more information and is easier to use than ever before. The old one was getting the job done (most of the time), but was inelegant, missed data critical for understanding recent events, and was pretty hard to scan and digest. After talking to our customers and seeing how we use it ourselves we decided to start from a blank slate and redesign it instead of applying UI band-aids.

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