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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once that’s complete I’ll get a chance to revise this article, but be warned some of those details may be a little out of date depending on when you read this post.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. ...

After a couple months off, SC DUG met this month with a presentation on super cheap Drupal hosting. Chris Zietlow from Mindgrub, Will Jackson from Kanopi Studios, and I all gave short talks very cheap ways to host Drupal 8. Chris opened by talking about using AWS Micro servers. Will shared a solution using a Raspberry Pi for a fully wireless server. I closed the discussion with a review of using Drupal Tome on Netlify. ...

Drupal Tome is a static site generator distribution of Drupal 8. It provides mechanisms for taking an entire Drupal site and exporting all the content to HTML for direct service. As part of a recent competition at SCDUG to come up with the cheapest possible Drupal 8 hosting, I decided to do a proof-of-concept level implementation of Drupal 8 with Docksal for local content editing, and Netlify for hosting (total cost was just the domain registration). ...

Pantheon is an excellent hosting service for both Drupal and Wordpress sites. But to make their platform work and scale well they have a number of limits built into the platform. These include process time limits and memory limits. While they are large enough for the majority of projects, large projects can have trouble. For data loading their official answer is typically to copy the database to another server, run your job there, and copy the database back onto their server. That’s fine if you can afford to freeze updates to your production site. And have the time to setup a process to mirror changes into your temporary copy. And can afford some additional project overhead. But sometimes those things are not an option. Or the data load takes too long, or happens too often, for that to be practical on a regular basis. ...

I recently had reason to switch over to using Docksal for a project, and on the whole I really like it as a good easy solution for getting a project specific Drupal dev environment up and running quickly. But like many dev tools the docs I found didn’t quite cover what I wanted because they made a bunch of assumptions. Most assumed either I was starting a generic project or that I was starting a Pantheon specific project – and that I already had Docksal experience. In my case I was looking for a quick emergency replacement environment for a long-running Pantheon project. ...