Every week I try to ask myself: What did I do this week to make myself more valuable? Am I moving forward toward a goal, or further from it? 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. You are either learning new skills, trends, tools, and concepts, or you’re falling behind as other people build new tools that drive new ideas and trends. ...

This week I was working with a new colleague on our account team. As with all people knew to working with technical teams and bug tracking, she’s having to learn how to create good trouble tickets for when clients report issues. This is a challenge I’ve seen played out in every place I’ve ever worked: developers want detailed tickets so we can dive in without asking 16 follow up questions, and people creating tickets don’t actually know what we want and assume we know how to find and fix the problem. And so I’d like to try to offer this explanation of what we’re looking for and why. ...

I’ve been struggling with what to write about our new president, the protests he’s triggered, the ban on refugees he’s ordered, the families he’s dividing, the hateful things he has said about many groups, and all the related news. While this is mostly a technology blog and much more articulate people are already saying things worth hearing, these are not events I can allow to pass without comment. For a variety of reasons I haven’t been able to attend the protests, except I accidentally attended part of a rally in Philadelphia (I thought the rally pictured above was over when I met a friend for dinner right in the middle of it), but it’s been exciting to watch the sustained energy the last few weeks. ...

For Drupal 7, I have a pattern to help simplify creating and managing custom blocks for a site. Since the standard hook_block_info() and really hook_block_view() implementations tend to get messy and junked up with markup in the code. My solution was the use the block delta key from the block info array as a helper function name called from the hook_block_view(), and a theme function in hook_theme() to make sure I could easily create a template for each block. I’m not going into detail about it since was hardly original and I’ve seen several variations from other developers. ...

In December I gave a talk at the SCDUG meeting on Drupal 8 plugins. This is based on that talk with a few improvements and additions from things I’ve learned since. Drupal 8 provides many great improvements, but one I’ve been finding to be the most exciting is the easy ability to create my own plugins. They are actually a bit addictive, and it’s easy to start seeing projects as an excuse to create a new plugin manager. At first it can take a little bit of effort to get your head around the process, but I got great details from Unraveling the Drupal 8 Plugin System from Drupalize.me. But the problem with those, and all the examples I could find, was they were either too deep (the drupalize.me article should be considered required reading, but the example is too abstract for most people) or too shallow ( the drupal.org Plugin API examples currently lack context about why I would want to do this in practice). ...

If you support any web site long enough you will suffer a break in. If you support lots of web sites you will suffer them more often than you’ll want to admit in public. A few weeks ago my number came up again in the attack lottery when we discovered a client’s web site was being used as a proxy and redirect to a fake shoe site. It wasn’t the first time I’d suffered a break in, and unfortunately I don’t expect it to be the last. My last experience with a major break in was shortly after Drupalgeddon (I patched all the clients I was supporting before they were breached but had to clean up sites that weren’t patched by other vendors), and the attackers had learned a few new tricks in the meantime. ...

I’ve worked from home part-time or full-time for the past four years. The first question I’m always asked when people learn I work from home is “Do you wear pants?” The answer is yes, I wear pants to work even when no one can see me. And frankly I don’t quite understand the desire of large numbers of people to work without pants, but it led me to realize that it might be helpful to share a few tips for people starting to work remotely. ...

Last week Cyberwoven hosted the local SC DUG. To encourage people to come when we hold these events in Columbia I’ve blatantly started to bribe people with baked goods: I give the presenter a choice of Cookies, Cake, or Pie – everyone picks cookies (unless I swap in Brownies instead of cookies then they pick brownies), no one asks for pie or cake. This month Will gave a talk about Docker and asked for cake! Since I was excited to finally have someone actually ask for something interesting I decided to do something Drupal themed: I made Drupal Cake. ...

Update (Oct 2017): In the weeks and months that followed this posting, thanks those who read and shared it and our related message on Facebook, my sister-in-law received most than 500 postcards and letters from across the country welcoming her students, some sent gifts and donations. The messages came from people of all walks of life, including other immigrant children. Many of the messages were read to the entire class and she sent postcards home for their families to enjoy. These simply gestures were a light in a very dark place for these new and often frightened Americans. ...

During last month’s SCDUG I gave two presentations. I’ve already posted the Sins Against Drupal talk I gave. That didn’t take up much time, and since I had been prepping some thoughts on the first few Drupal 8 projects I gave a second short talk on what I’ve learned working with Drupal 8 during its first year. ## What's not new? Drupal 8 brings forward lots of concepts from Drupal 7 (and prior versions). It also brings forward a few standard community realities. ...