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Life on both sides: Some things I've learned as a client and as a consultant.

Accessibility beyond the scanner means leveraging your empathy for other people and thinking about how they experience your content.

How to navigate to Custom Metadata records in a Salesforce LWC, including edit and manage records links.

Learn how to prevent Salesforce from truncating Custom Metadata text fields and discover the simple solution.

A Salesforce tool to invalidate email addresses in an org to prevent accidental messages.

AI tools are creating change everywhere – especially college campuses. But we need to talk about how we use it.

We all have to constantly be learning. These suggestions are more or less in the reverse direction of importance. Keep reading.

Why and how I converted my blog to use Hugo instead of WordPress.

Developers love to lie to themselves. Herein you'll find some of the worst lies Salesforce developers use on themselves.

Some guides and suggestions to improve your writing and communication skills as a developer or consulting.

Please stop using Salesforce Ids in URLs or other user accessible parts of your solution.

To make the right selection you need to balance your overall data ecosystem, staffing, budget, audience interest, as well as projected growth over time. I keep wanting to create a simple decision matrix, but an easy solution eludes me still.

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.

Suggestions about how to prepare for the first, or next Salesforce Exam.

Advice from a college professor's spouse about how to succeed in college. Based on my own observations and my own conclusions.

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.

Editing you own writing is the first step to writing well as a developer, consultant, or any other form of technical professional.

Earlier this month my mother, Maria Crosman, passed away. I miss her. But I'm happy for the time we had together, and the lesson she was able to teach me.

How to create scratch org config files for Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud and Education Cloud

Over the last few years I’ve done a number of large data migrations into Salesforce, and developed a pattern I like to follow.

As we exit the Great Resignation, application materials are increasingly important again. Make your mid-career resume shines.

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.

Queries on Queries presents opinionated questions to help you evaluate and improve your data migration process and practices

Three lessons I wish I knew on when I started doing Salesforce Data Migrations.

The Salesforce MVPs are a group of people who are recognized within the Salesforce community as leaders and contributors. And now I'm one!

Major Sidney Freedman was often the perfect psychiatrist at the perfect moment – all consultants wish we were as effective as Sidney.

Consultants get a lot of good tactical advice. But if we take things too far we are only slightly less clueless than Flagg.

Balancing the ideal and the practical is one of the challenges in consulting. Try to find Father Mulcahy's balance.

If you’re a developer, go learn a new language. If you’re not a developer, go learn something different from what you use every day. It’ll force you out of your comfort zone and get you to learn more than you expect.

We all can benefit from being conversant on many topics and understanding their interplay. That broad understand allows us to be more informed in our lives.

In the days that followed the Dobbs ruling I joined a small but vocal group of people from Aiken calling for protection of the rights of women's and others. There are people in South Carolina who descent.

In a moment when the country is in another downward spiral about all I can think to offer are a few images from a recent hike on the Boone Fork Trail.

A getting started guide for Salesforce2Sql schema generator.

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.

Disable a Salesforce Trigger in Production with VS Code (and a solution if there are failing tests to bypass).

Project estimation tool using Monte Carlo simulations and graphs to tell a story that empowers good decisions.

This week I helped create two new faker providers for Snowfakery: Faker Nonprofit and Faker EDU

Like many people I aspire to be more like my dog. She has handled life’s ups and down with grace and forgiveness.

Build developers should build cycles of respect with their colleagues.

Giving kind feedback is better than being nice. Make sure you tell the truth when giving reviews.

As a service to all those headed off to college I thought I’d offer a few piece of college advice I’ve picked up as a professor’s spouse.

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.

Creating a custom Faker Provider for Snowfakery to generate exactly the data you want not just the data you need.

Directions for creating plugins for Snowfakery to generate exactly the data you want not just the data you need.

This month I gave a talk at South Carolina Drupal User Group on Getting Started with Electron.

Chris Zietlow from Mindgrub gave his new talk on AWS: How an online retailer came to conquer the Internet.

Writing how-to articles and sharing instructions is one of the best ways to help the community

A security change invalidated nearly all tutorials on LWC URL parameters. This one fixes that.

I would like to introduce Electron Salesforce Base, a secure base-line for Electron projects with Salesforce.

This Snowfakery recipe creates 30 gifts, 20% from companies, 80% from households. They are spread randomly over a set of preexisting Campaigns, and create the needed Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, and Payments.

This month's SC DUG featured Mauricio Orozco posing questions about getting started as a consultant to long-time members who have all done some work with Drupal as a consultant.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Rosh Hashanah. In the Jewish tradition, that makes her a person of great righteousness. May her memory be a blessing.

This month I gave a talk at SCDUG on encouraging creating testing plans for teams that have been resistant for any number of reasons.

A simple project template for starting Electron Projects with a good security baseline.

Mauricio Orozco from the SC Commission for Minority Affairs gave a talk about the state of Drupal within the SC State government.

None of us really trust police, the question should be what do we do next.

This month’s SC DUG meeting featured Will Jackson from Kanopi Studios talking about his virtual background and office.

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.

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.

For SC DUG Feb. 2020 I gave a talk on the importance of self-directed learning for professional development as a developer – or really any other modern career. The presentation runs a hair over 30 minutes, and parts of the discussion are included as well.

I’ve learned a few things about taking pictures at weddings that I think make the couples happy while giving you good pictures to share.

Over time I’ve come to realize that the further you get into your career, the less the distinction between being formally trained and self-taught means anything; eventually we are all mostly self-taught.

Here is my list of works that I think every developer should read at least once in their life.

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.

Setting up a static site on Netlify with Drupal 8, Tome, and Docksal.

Using Drupal batches and old school PHP file handles to bypass Pantheon Timeouts. Import all the data you need.

Docksal has support for a project init command that helps setup projects for Pantheon. Since I had to run a dozen Google searches to make it work I figured I'd write it up.

Mauricio Orozco's review of lessons he learned at DrupalCon North America 2019.

In honor of the 20th anniversary of the Hague Appeal for Peace and everything that happened as part of that event and since, I decided to post some of my pictures.

PHP Function to support FormAssembly dynamic parameter signing.

When someone tries to insult you with what you often see as a compliment it is worth stopping to reflect. Am I an activist?

Will Jackson's presentation on using Docksal for Drupal development.

Kaylan Wagner's Presentation on applying gaming lessons that are useful at work.

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.

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.

IT workers spend a lot of time acquiring information that promptly goes out of date. Be careful what you bother to memorize.

Developers need to know how to communicate. That includes to be able to write well in their primary spoken languages as well as they can writing in their primary programming languages.

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.

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.

Notes from DrupalCon 2018 in Nashville.

Pictures from March for Our Lives in Aiken, SC

The majority of resources are focused on using composer for publicly available code but sometimes you need a private repo.

Often the most useful ways to serve my community seems to require doing a things that should be utterly unneeded.

After a few tries I think I’ve struck on an effective process for creating modules with complex default configuration.

Eventually every organization will face a crisis that requires a public response. In my experience most of the time the crisis that actually emerges isn’t what you expected and includes strange details that easily distract everyone from the main issue.

I recently completed a project that included pulling data from a remote database. I figured I might save a few people time by writing it up.

It's time to make sure our colleagues get the respect and support they deserve.

Frequently organizations fall in love with a site design that includes excellent pictures on every page. Those designs and images may be great, but only if you provide new images as fast as you create new pages (often faster).

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.

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.

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

I’ve worked with expert beginners, and I think it is a curable condition. It requires three things: mentoring, training, and pushing yourself in ways they can see.

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.

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.

A simple Drupal 8 custom block pattern to make projects easier to maintain over time.

Why and how to build your own Drupal 8 custom plugins.

If you support any web site long enough you will suffer a break in. A few weeks ago my number came up again in the attack lottery.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.