As part of my effort not to repeat mistakes I have tried to build a habit in my professional – and personal – life to look for ways to be better at what I do. 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. This is the Holden Barina we rented while in New Zealand, a brand of car I’d never heard of before this trip. It was a good car for the mountain driving even if the wipers and lights controls were reversed from cars at home. By driving on the left I discovered how many basic driving habits I have that are built around driving on the right. The clearest being that the whole time I was in New Zealand I never knew if anyone was behind me, and the whole time I couldn’t figure out why. The mirrors on the car worked just fine, but it turned out I wasn’t looking at them. ...

Near the end of her life my grandmother made hats – lots of hats. Most of them made from cheap acrylic yarns and most sized for children. She lived alone and spent much of her time sitting in her apartment watching C-SPAN and knitting. At the time her apartment was a few blocks from my office so I went to visit her about once a week and we’d chat about current events, politics, and whatever else was on her mind. If you went to visit her during the winter and you were not wearing a hat when you arrived (and since she was on the 19th floor I usually took my hat off in the elevator) you were strongly encouraged to take a few to keep warm when you left. ...

For our 15th anniversary my wife and went to the south island of New Zealand, with a long layover in Sydney. We only had a few hours in Sydney so we went to see the Opera House and then walk through the botanical gardens next door. As we walked around the harbor I took pictures of the opera house from several different angles. And that 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. ...

Every few years organizations replace a major system or two: the web site, CMS, CRM, financial databases, grant software, HR system, etc. And too often organizations try to make the new tool behave just like the old tool, and as a result hate the new tool until they realize that they misconfigured it and then spend 5-10 years dealing with problems that could have been avoided. If you’re going to spend a lot of money overhauling a mission critical tool you should love it from day one. ...

This is part of my ongoing series about ways Drupal can be badly misused. These examples are from times someone tried to solve an otherwise interesting problem in just about the worst possible way. I present these at SC Drupal Users Group meetings from time to time as an entertaining way to discuss interesting problems and ways we can all improve. This one was presented about a year ago now (August 2015). Since I wasn’t working with Drupal 8 when I did this presentation the solution here is Drupal 7 (if someone asks I could rewrite for Drupal 8). ...

This is the first is an ongoing series about ways Drupal can be badly misused. These are generally times someone tried to solve an otherwise interesting problem in just about the worst possible way. All of these will start with a description of the problem, how not to solve it, and then ideas about how to solve it well. I present these at SC Drupal Users Group meetings from time to time as an entertaining way to discuss ways we can all improve our skills. ...

This week many in the Drupal community lost a lot of sleep Tuesday night because the security team treated us to a warning about major security updates due out on Wednesday. Fortunately for many it wasn’t a crisis in the end, but it gave us all a chance to practice for the worst. Basically, it was like a fire drill in a elementary school: we got to prepare like there was a disaster, but since they wasn’t one we don’t really know how it would have gone if there was actually a fire. We haven’t had a stop-drop-and-roll type of emergency in a while, so it was a good refresher on how to handle a crisis. ...

Last year Drupal 8 finally arrived, and brought the question that comes with every new release of Drupal: when should I update? New releases of Drupal mean two things: new features and cool new tools, and the retirement of an old version. We got the power and flexibility of Symfony and Drupal 6 sites are no longer getting community support. Unlike Wordpress, which has well defined upgrade paths, each version of Drupal is a new adventure in upgrade pain. The more I watch people suffer with this pain, and the more I watch them try to find a way to do upgrades that preserve their site’s fundamental structure, the more I come to the conclusion that this pain is telling us something: we’re doing it wrong. Not because Drupal’s strategy is wrong, but because keeping all your content in the same structures is usually wrong. Drupal 8 should not make it easy for you to continue to use an old strategy, it should encourage us to update old assumptions. ...

I spent ten years working at a nonprofit organization wishing I had the kinds of resources that large corporations can put toward their marketing efforts. A nonprofit the organization’s web site and related marketing are usually seen as overhead, and overhead is bad, therefore budgets limited. Nonprofit budgets are tight in general which doesn’t leave a lot of extra room for fancy services, tools, and consultants. Then I started to work with large corporations. Turns out, all that money doesn’t necessarily bring you people who know how to spend it well. Yes the margins are bigger, and there is less complaining about the basic costs of doing business, but when it comes right down to it they aren’t any more strategic than a small scrappy team of people in the communications department of any organization large enough to have a communications team. ...

The first major online application I wrote was a petition for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in an attempt to build support against the war in Iraq. The Iraq Peace Pledge succeeded in that it gave people a place to voice their frustration and helped encourage the anti-war movement. It failed in the sense that the guy writing the software (me) had no idea what he was doing, MoveOn completely stole our thunder (gathering 100 times more names than we did), and it didn’t exactly prevent the war in Iraq. ...