All
2024 13
December 1
November 1
One of the common needs, or at least desires, for CRM users is to link their CRM to some kind of constituent portal. There are several ways you can architect a good data pattern for your constituent portal. The trick is picking the right one for your organization.
October 1
August 1
July 1
June 1
May 3
How we use language affects how our audience perceives us. In school teachers and professors taught many of us formal – and strict – rules for writing. Those rules are useful to know, but my point is not that you need to follow them strictly.
March 2
January 1
2023 14
December 1
November 1
October 1
August 1
July 3
More questions you can use to challenge your team to improve your migration game.
More questions you can use to challenge your team to improve your migration game.
Questions you can use to challenge your team to improve your migration game.
June 1
May 2
March 1
February 1
January 1
2022 14
December 1
November 1
October 2
August 1
July 1
June 1
May 1
April 4
A problem is not intrinsically interesting. We find problems interesting for our own reasons. That interest makes us intrinsically motivated to solve them.
This week's Salesforce Developer Podcast featured an interview recorded the end of last year. We talk about Snowfakery, PHP, Drupal, and more...
Our project demonstrates that building a supportive community can yield great results.
Now and then something happens to us all that reminds us we're not perfect.
February 1
January 1
2021 13
December 1
November 2
August 1
July 2
For the July 2021 SC DUG, I gave my new talk titled "Queries on Queries" which poses questions to ask yourself when migrating data between systems.
In June for the SC DUG meeting Will Jackson from Kanopi Studios gave a talk about using his new MQTT module for Drupal 8/9 to connect to local IoT devices.
June 1
May 1
April 1
March 1
February 1
January 1
2020 16
December 1
November 1
October 1
August 2
July 2
May 1
April 2
This month's SC DUG was a round table discussion on working remotely during the Covid-19 lock down. We had actually planned this topic before the crisis emerged in full, but found ourselves having to pivot our talking points a fair bit.
March 3
Due to Covid-19 right now huge number of people are suddenly working remote. Some wanted this for a long time and are suddenly getting the chance; some didn’t really want a remote job but now are forced to try it.
This has been an interesting week for academics as we move to online instruction, perhaps for the first time. Here’s what I’ve learned and the order in which I found it helpful to tackle the sudden move.
Launching a website can be a nerve-wracking experience, often times with developers working up until the wire trying to finish that one last feature. If only there was a crystal ball that would show you a vision of how your site would fare when the masses were set loose upon it.
February 1
January 1
2019 18
December 1
November 1
October 4
How to query Salesforce from Drupal and proxy the results as JSON responses.
Creating your own custom field mapping between Drupal and Salesforce using the Drupal Salesforce Suite.
There is nothing wrong with just being good at something.
August 1
July 1
June 1
May 2
April 1
March 1
February 2
January 3
Chris Zietlow's presentation on about using Machine Learning to Improve UX.
Drupal 8 batch jobs were basically untouched from previous versions. So I created a module that handles this problem elegantly.
Pictures from our holiday trip to Belize.
2018 11
November 2
In software just about all project management methodologies get labeled one of two things: Agile or Waterfall. There are formal definitions of both labels, but in practice few companies stick to those definitions particularly in the world of consulting. For people who really care about such things, there are actually many more methodologies out there but largely for marketing reasons we call any process that’s linear in nature Waterfall, and any that is iterative we call Agile.
This year I took part in Hacktoberfest. Partially to see what it's all about, partially to get involved, and partially the free t-shirt.
August 1
July 1
June 1
I went to the Families Belong Together protest at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Augusta, and organized by a few of their members, Progressives for Democratic Reform, along with a few other like minded groups that think tearing families apart is repugnant.
May 2
I found a great question for a candidate to ask at least once in every interview process: “What else should I have asked you?”
In a world that at times seems to grow increasingly uncaring, chaotic, and impossible to change, two sets of teenagers, a century apart, living remarkably different lives, may offer us a path forward.
April 1
March 1
February 1
January 1
2017 22
December 1
November 1
October 2
July 2
We like to say developers have a right be judged by code alone. The problem is that it’s not actually true nor just.
After several hours on hold, 5 or 6 visits (I've lost count), and them testing everything in sight I finally started writing software to see if I can help find a problem on my internet connection.
June 2
This week I was working on a site where one of those blocks needs to be enabled or disabled on specific nodes at the discretion of the content author.
I wrote a simple tool to create project estimates that simulates how long a list of tasks might take.
May 3
Writing directions can be thankless: you know you provided good directions when people use them and never complain about them.
A few weeks ago I wrote about not taking free t-shirts from vendors at DrupalCon (or other tech conferences). Well DrupalCon North America 2017 has come and gone so I thought I'd report back on this year's t-shirts.
Drupal 8 provides a CacheableJsonResponse class that links up to the rest of the Drupal 8 caching engine to provide much better performance than a stand Symfony JsonResponse
April 3
March 2
A few years ago I was traveling to DrupalCon with a female colleague who was attending for the first time. The all male team had attended several times before that and she had always liked the interesting variety of t-shirts they came home with, and was looking forward to finally getting something for herself. Only she didn’t.
Remember when you fight with your users about passwords the problem isn’t your users, the problem is we have made passwords unreasonably hard to do right.
February 3
In technology, communications, or any other job that involves one of those two things you are either moving forward or moving backward: standing still is not an option.
If I can’t reproduce the problem, I can’t promise you I fixed it. If you can’t reproduce the problem, you can’t check that I’m right.
January 2
2016 20
December 1
November 5
Yes, I wear pants to work even when no one can see me.
A developer needed to provide a custom authentication solution that allows staff to have one backend and members another -- and failed.
October 3
Any project that takes more than a couple hours to complete involves too many details for most people to remember for more than a few days.
The push to graduate students to be “workplace ready” in engineering and technology is – at best – short-term thinking.
The most important skill I have is the ability to learn new skills. And I learned that by getting a degree at a liberal arts college.
September 3
Just because your database cannot handle modern families does not make it okay.
I recently rediscovered how much you can learn when you try doing something you know well backwards: I drove on the left side of the road.
My grandmother made A LOT of hats, and inspired me to make them for kids in need.
August 3
Walking around Sydney harbor got me thinking about the advice I’ve been given both about photography and about my work: make sure you try things from different angles.
Too often organizations try to make the new tool behave just like the old tool then spend years dealing with problems that could have been avoided.
The developer needed to support existing Flash training games used internally by the client, and broke Drupal to do it.
July 5
A developer needed to support an existing JavaScript app with access to content in the form of Drupal nodes encoded in JSON, and broke all the rules.
Nonprofits often struggle to figure out the right way to leverage new tools because they try to leverage them first, and drive marketing innovation.
Always making new mistakes is a great want to push yourself forward while understanding you'll never be perfect.