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. ...

Like most amateur photographers I often attend friends’ weddings with my camera and take a lot of pictures. I’ve also been tapped to be wedding photographer for a few friends and family over time, usually as a planned favor or gift but not always with forewarning. From those experiences I’ve learned a few things about taking pictures at weddings that I think make the couples happy while giving you good pictures to share. ...

From time to time conversations come up among developers, and other fellow travelers, about being self-taught vs getting formal training. Over time I’ve come to realize that the further and further you get into your career, the less the distinction means anything; eventually we are all mostly self-taught. I’ve written before about the value of my liberal arts education and I stand by my assertion that what I learned in that setting was, and is, valuable to my life and work. But just because something was useful to life does not mean it was the only way to acquire the skills. It’s a good way for many people, but far from the only way. ...

Every developer needs to be learning new things all the time. We need to have a good grounding in the ideas that have come before us and those that are emerging around us within our field, and we need to understand the larger social impact of our work. To be fair this isn’t just true of developers, but we are a field that has a bad habit of arguing our work is totally new and original – which is rarely true in any meaningful way. ...

The Drupal 8 version of the Salesforce Suite provides a powerful combination of features that are ready to use and mechanisms for adding custom add-ons you may need. What it does not yet have is lots of good public documentation to explain all those features. A recent support issue in the Salesforce issue queue asked for example code for writing queries. While I’ll address some of that here, there is ongoing work to replace the query interface to be more like Drupal core’s. Hopefully once that’s complete I’ll get a chance to revise this article, but be warned some of those details may be a little out of date depending on when you read this post. ...

The Drupal 8 Salesforce Suite allows you to map Drupal entities to Salesforce objects using a 1-to-1 mapping. To do this it provides a series of field mapping types that allow you to select how you want to relate the data between the two systems. Each field type provides handling to help ensure the data is handled correctly on each side of the system. As of this writing the suite provides six usable field mapping types: ...

When I was in school I was a solid B student. I thought of myself as a B student and I worked hard to make sure I was always working at least a B average. I worked hard, but not too hard. Likely I could have been an A student if I’d worked harder, but I would not have been as happy. I didn’t feel the drive to be the best all the time, just good enough to keep up with what I was learning. Most people brag about being A students, but that wasn’t me and it has worked out pretty well in the long run. ...

This year’s Arts in the Heart of Augusta was not hurricane plagued the way last year’s was, and was a great weekend of good food, performances, and generally great chances to take pictures. Each year opens with a parade to celebrate the diverse set of communities that have settled in and around Augusta. Drummers from the Chinese community welcomed everyone to the annual opening parade. Representatives from various communities waiting their turn. Children from the Lebanese community. And at the end of the parade everyone dances. ...