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For a project I’ve been working on recently we had need to create a module that provides secure redirects from a Drupal site to FormAssembly. Overall the module does a number of things, but handling dynamic parameter signing was the thing that took the most time. FormAssembly provides a variety of great features for creating flexible forms that integrate with Salesforce. One of the more popular features is its ability to pull data from Salesforce to prefill fields on a form. But the downside is that it is easy to create forms that leak information from Salesforce into those forms, and create privacy risks. ...

On Valentines Day this year my wife and I spent a few hours at DSS for a meeting related to some of the children we work with in the Guardian ad Litem program. In the course of a rather tense conversation a caseworker tossed out “Well, I am not an activist.” with the clear intention of implying that I am, and that activists are a problem. It is the first time I can recall being called an Activist as an insult, and I’ve been a bit hung up on the topic ever since. ...

For the SC DUG meeting this month Will Jackson from Kanopi Studios gave a talk about using Docksal for local Drupal development. Will has the joy of working with some of the Docksal developers and has become an advocate for the simplicity and power Docksal provides. 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. ...

A few weeks ago I took a few hours to scratch an itch and went out did a little local photography. I spent much of my time wondering the trails through Aiken State Park. Although there are a few included here from another stop I made, and from the Lunar eclipse on January 21st. The trees along the entrance to Aiken State Park. ...

This fall the South Carolina Drupal User’s Group started using Zoom are part of all our meetings. Sometimes the technology has worked better than others, but when it works in our favor we are recording the presentations and sharing them when we can. In November Kaylan Wagner gave a draft talk on using experiences in the world of online gaming to be a better remote team member. We frequently use these presentations to practice new presentations and test out new ideas. If you want to see a polished version hunt group members out 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. ...

This fall the South Carolina Drupal User’s Group started using Zoom are part of all our meetings. Sometimes the technology has worked better than others, but when it works in our favor we are recording the presentations and sharing them when we can. Chris Zietlow presented back in September about using Machine Learning to Improve UX. We frequently use these presentations to practice new presentations and test out new ideas. If you want to see a polished version hunt group members out 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. ...

For this month’s South Carolina Drupal User Group I gave a talk about creating Batch Services in Drupal 8. As a quick side note we are trying to include video conference access to all our meetings so please feel free to join us even if you cannot come in person. Since Drupal 8 was first released I have been frustrated by the fact that Drupal 8 batch jobs were basically untouched from previous versions. There is nothing strictly wrong with that approach, but it has never felt right to me particularly when doing things in a batch job that I might also want to do in another context – that really should be a service and I should write those core jobs first. After several frustrating experiences trying to find a solution I like, I finally created a module that provides an abstract class that can be used to create a service that handles this problem just more elegantly. The project also includes an example module to provide a sample service. ...

For Christmas this year my wife and I took off and went to Belize. I took some 2,500 pictures and I’m working my way through them. First sighting of Belize on the flight in. ...

In software just about all project management methodologies get labeled one of two things: Agile or Waterfall. There are formal definitions of both labels, but in practice few companies stick to those definitions particularly in the world of consulting. For people who really care about such things, there are actually many more methodologies out there but largely for marketing reasons we call any process that’s linear in nature Waterfall, and any that is iterative we call Agile. ...

This year I took part in Hacktoberfest. Partially to see what all the fuss is about, partially to get myself involved in projects I didn’t know about, and partially for the free t-shirt (which do come in men’s and women’s cuts). If you haven’t run into this project before it’s an effort by Digital Ocean to get people to participate in open source projects. Once you sign up they count all public pull requests you make on Github toward a goal of 5. I participated both as a developer, and by tagging a few issues on my own projects so people would find them. ...