A few years ago during a job interview at a nonprofit organization, the Executive Director asked me about the culture of the job I was leaving. He had noticed that I was stressing the importance of good feedback during my interviews and wanted to know why it was so important to me. Indeed, part of why I was job hunting was the job I had rejected the notion of mistakes – everyone’s work was always good. I told him that, and that I do my best work when I get honest feedback. He responded by drawing a distinction between being nice and being kind. He was sure everyone I worked with was quite nice, but they didn’t sound very kind to him. ...

My wife is a college professor. That means, in addition to being married to a very smart person, I also get to hear lots of tips and tricks about how to do well in college – particularly this last year with my wife doing office hours from home on video from her office just outside our kitchen. So as a service to all those headed off to college in the fall (including our oldest nephew), students already working to complete degrees, and to all the professors and instructors out there, I thought I’d offer a few pieces of college advice I’ve picked up as a professor’s spouse. I’m also blending in a few things I learned getting my own degree and from working professionally with colleges on a regular basis (basically, if you don’t like anything in here, blame me not my wife). ...

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. Data migrations are often critical to project success, but all too often that are treating as a throw-away process. This talk is intentionally platform agnostic building from my experience with both Drupal and Salesforce. If you would like to join us please check out our up coming events on MeetUp. You’ll find our meeting times and, once you RSVP, remote connection information. ...

In June for the SC DUG meeting Will Jackson from Kanopi Studios gave a talk about using MQTT with Drupal to connect to local IoT devices. A fan of home automation, Will has created a Drupal 8/9 version of the MQTT module. He is hoping to encourage more people in the Drupal community to join the fun. If you would like to join us please check out our up coming events on MeetUp. You’ll find our meeting times and, once you RSVP, remote connection information. ...

Last week I posted part 1 of this series on creating plugins for Snowfakery. This second installment covers creating custom Faker Providers to use as plugins for Snowfakery. Why create a Faker Provider instead of Snowfakery Plugin Python’s Faker library provides many useful things, but not everything you might want. Fortunately it is designed to be extended, and Snowfakery is designed to help make it possible for those extensions to be project specific when you need to (or when it makes it easier for your team to share recipes). ...

Last November I wrote a bit about creating Salesforce data with Snowfakery. I’ve continued to use the tool for work, provide feedback to the project maintainer, and help the Salesforce Open Source Commons Data Generation Toolkit Project as we started to build a library of sample recipes. Hopefully I will have more to say on that after the next Community Sprint. Snowfakery not only gives you a way create carefully shaped relational data sets of nearly any size, it also allows you to create plugins to extend its abilities. those plugins come in two flavors: Snowfakery Plugins, and Faker Providers. ...

This month I gave a talk at South Carolina Drupal User Group on Getting Started with Electron. Electron allows you to use your web developer skills to create desktop applications. I based this talk on some of my recent side projects and the Electron Project Starter I posted the end of last year. If you would like to join us please check out our up coming events on MeetUp for meeting times, locations, and remote connection information. ...

Chris Zietlow from Mindgrub gave his new talk on AWS: How an online retailer came to conquer the Internet. He explores the Genesis of Amazon Web Services, how it became widely adopted, and a birds eye view of some of the more common problems their services can solve. If you would like to join us please check out our up coming events on MeetUp for meeting times, locations, and remote connection information. ...

Part of contributing to any open source project, or even really being a contributing member of any community, is sharing what you know. That can come in many forms. While many projects over emphasis code, and most of us understand the value of conference talks, good how-to articles are some of the most critical contributions for any software platform. There isn’t much point to a tool if people cannot figure out how to use it. ...

A couple weeks ago I needed to create a Salesforce Lightning Web Component (LWC) that pulls values from URL parameters. While the process is very simple it turns out the vast majority of examples on the web are out of date due to a security update Salesforce made sometime last year – and so I spent a frustrating afternoon throwing ideas at the wall until a colleague stumbled into a comment on a blog post that was an incorrect example by a highly trusted expert noting the needed fix. So, in the hopes of shortening the search for anyone else trying to get this to work, I’m offering an example that works – at least as of this writing. ...