Earlier today I push my Electron Simple Starter to Github. It has dependencies only to Electron, Electron Debug, and ESlint (but no specific settings, you can add those yourself). All the basic pieces are in place to encourage good security practices. It will run without warnings or errors, and puts in place all plumbing you need for their current inter-process communication, default overrides, and process sandboxing to help you write a secure app. ...

Mauricio Orozco from the SC Commission for Minority Affairs gave a talk about the state of Drupal within the SC State government. In recent years Drupal has grown from a tool used on a small number of projects to the platform of choice for all new agency sites. He spoke about the state’s initiative to move more to Drupal, South Carolina Interactive and their role in supporting government projects, which agencies are moving toward Drupal, and how this is benefiting residents of South Carolina. ...

Over the last few weeks the US has been moved to action about policing and racial justice in response to the murder of George Floyd. As someone who is deeply concerned about these issues I always struggle to find words I feel do the topic justice; they seem too important to stay silent, too critical to speak about poorly, and too complex for me to write about well. For my limitations in what follows, I’m sorry. ...

This month’s SC DUG meeting featured Will Jackson from Kanopi Studios talking about his virtual background and office. Before everyone was learning to use Zoom virtual backgrounds, Will had built out a full 3D room for his background, including family pictures and other fun details. He talked about what he built and may inspire you to try some more personalized than swaying palm tree and night skies. If you would like to join us please check out our up coming events on MeetUp for meeting times, locations, and remote connection information. ...

Back when we were allowed to go out and about, my wife and I spent a few days in New York City so she could attend a conference. We explored a few of the art museum and I got some time to just hang around Central Park and take pictures. I had started to post this gallery a while back, but got distracted by life and didn’t finish. So as a reminder that there is a larger world out there, and we’ll get to go back to exploring it one day I figured I’d finally get this finished. ...

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. The discussion centered on things that people are dealing with, even those of us who work remotely on a regular basis. A few resources were shared by people on the call, including Pantheon’s Donut Slack Bot. ...

About three years ago I wrote up some of my thinking on what you need to succeed in remote work and I still stand by most of that advice. But right now many of those suggestions may need to be goals you are working towards. A few days ago my friend Johanna, who like me routinely works from home, learned she’ll be working from home while she and her partner try their hand at homeschooling and offered this tweet: ...

This is a guest post by my wife Elizabeth Georgian. She’s a professor at a local university and is one of many scrambling to move all her courses online. This has been an interesting week for academics as we move to online instruction, perhaps for the first time. At my university, we heard on Monday that we’re going online next week. Needless to say, this has been a pretty chaotic few days. Here’s what I’ve learned and the order in which I found it helpful to tackle the problem. For context, I’m a history professor at a regional public university, teaching four classes, with a lot of general education students. I mostly teach face-to-face, but I’m online in the summers. ...

This month’s SC DUG featured Chris from MindGrub and Kaylan from Pantheon talking about Load Testing. 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. Good news for you, there is! Load testing. ...

This month for SC DUG I gave a talk on the importance of self-directed learning for professional development as a developer – or really any other modern career. It was an extension and revision of my December blog post on the same topic. The presentation runs a hair over 30 minutes, and parts of the discussion are included as well. We frequently use these presentations to practice new presentations, try out heavily revised versions, and test out new ideas with a friendly audience. If you want to see a polished version checkout our group members’ talks at camps and cons. So if some of the content of these videos seems a bit rough please understand we are all learning all the time and we are open to constructive feedback. ...