Awhile back I wrote up a pattern for creating static blocks on Drupal 8 sites. 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. To make this happen, I’m adding a new feature to my pattern. In older versions of Drupal there were a number of ways to go, like the PHP Filter, or custom handling in the block’s view hook, but I figured there were probably more appropriate tools for this in Drupal 8. And I found what I needed in the Condition Plugin (more evidence that plugins are addictive). According to the change record they were designed to centralize a lot of the common logic used for controlling blocks, and I found it works quite nicely in this case as well (although a more generalized version might be useful). ...

Any experienced developer, and anyone who has worked with developers, knows that we’re terrible at estimating project times. There are mountains of blog posts telling developers how to do estimates (spoiler alert, they are wrong), and at least as many telling project managers not to rely on the bad estimates from developers. Most of the honest advice doesn’t actually help you develop a number it helps you develop strategies to make a slightly better guess. ...

Last fall I wrote about the importance of writing good documentation, and part of writing good documentation includes writing good directions. I have a pet peeve when it comes to poorly written instructions of any kind, but unfortunately I’m still learning to do it well myself. Writing directions can be thankless: you know you provided good directions when people use them and never complain about them. If you write bad directions everyone who gets stuck complains about your work – and usually not nicely because you left them frustrated. ...

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. My free shirts from DrupalCon 2017 I ended up with seven new free shirts all from places that also offered them in women’s sizes. In addition to the official conference t-shirt I picked up shirts from Lingotek, Linode, Pantheon, Optasy, Chef.io, and Kanopi Studios. There were a couple companies that appeared to be giving out shirts I didn’t talk to so there may be a couple worthy of complementing that I missed. The big prize for the year goes to Linode whose job ad was a postcard in the shape of a (men’s) t-shirt and read: ...

This week I was working on a Drupal 8 project that includes a page that uses Drupal as a simple proxy to convert a weak XML API into a simple JSON response. To ensure good performance I wanted to ensure I had cached JSON responses. When I first built the site I hadn’t yet gotten my head around Drupal 8 caching, and so the JSON responses weren’t cached and therefore the page was slow. After some issues with the site caused me to have to look at this part of the project again I decided it was time to try to do something about this. ...

One of the things that the Drupal community has learned in the last few weeks is that our current governance structures aren’t working in several ways. Having spent a lot of time at DrupalCon talking about these issues I figured I share a few initial thoughts for those working on our new processes. This isn’t the first time I’ve been part of a community that was changing how it organizes itself. In my religious life I am a Quaker, and for a long time I was a member of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting which is the regional organizing body for Quakers in the greater Philadelphia area. And I served for a time on several of their leadership committees. I’ve seen that 300+ year old group pass through at least three different governance structures, and while many of the fundamentals are the same, the details that matter to people also change a lot. ...

I’m using this post as a place to store and share “notes” from DrupalCon Baltimore. The part of conference notes I tend to find most useful are links and stray ideas I get talking with people. I don’t tend to take detailed notes anymore since I rarely if ever go back to those, although on rare occasions I do re-watch a session if I found it particularly useful. Basically this is a dump of links, pictures from various things, and a few stray thoughts. I’ll edit as the week progresses and probably add more thoughts and ideas. ...

I’ve been reading Erik Deitrich’s blog a bunch recently, particularly two pieces he wrote last fall on how developers learn. They are excellent. I recommend them to anyone who thinks they are an expert particularly if you are just starting out. I am a good baker but this attempt at a giant sticky bun failed because I am not an expert. In short he argues for a category of developer he calls the Expert Beginner. These are people who rose to prominence in their company or community due more to a lack of local competition than raw skill. Developers who think they are great because they are good but have no real benchmarks to compare themselves to and no one calling them out for doing things poorly. These developers not only fail to do good work, but will hold back teams because they will discourage people from trying new paths they don’t understand. ...

With DrupalCon coming up I want to talk about a question I will be asking vendors giving out t-shirts: do you have women’s shirts? I’ll then request a men’s large (since it’s the size and cut that actually fits my body). Given the reminder this week about the problems in the Drupal community around misogynism this seems appropriate topic. Close your eyes and picture a Drupal developer (go ahead I’ll wait). I can’t say who you saw, but too many sales managers for technology companies just pictured a man or group of men. They want those developers to think well of their company and to wear shirts with their logos. They will buy, and in a few weeks give away, t-shirts for the developers they just pictured. They will forget that our community is strong because we’re diverse, and gender is a critically important form of diversity for us. ...

I deal with passwords a lot. In any given day I log into five or six servers, another dozen web sites, plus my personal systems and tools. Some are stored in password managers, some are memorized, some are mine, and some are shared. To avoid losing things I need I have several patterns, schemes, and password generation tools I use to try to keep up with it all and make sure I’m using good passwords most of the time. ...