drupal

It is safe to say that people like talking about themselves. I'm guilty of that, but I don't think I have actually given any real consideration or focus to the matter. That changed this morning. I had a friend ask me: "What are you passionate about?" I was disappointed by how lame I responded. At my core, I'm a problem solver. I'm also a social nerd - I love people; I'm an extrovert; I'm nerdy. I'm also a self-recognizing honey badger as this has traditionally served as my "winning strategy". None of these things define what I'm passionate about - they just define aspects of who I am and how I

Drupal has a full vocabulary of Drupalisms. While I think that is fine for Drupal-specific features, it also is a sign that we seem to promote our own island when there are similar concepts that exist in the technology space. When possible, we should try to align with more conventional terms that others outside of Drupal understand. If anything, this can make Drupal more approachable and better understood in broader context. I think I identified one such term: the term "Site Building" has never sat well with me - both as an activity and as a role. Site Building is an activity generally

Sometimes situations take time to resolve. This situation is complicated and the goal is to treat everyone respectfully. We're beginning to see things play out now. I want to offer some of my recent thoughts. By no means are they right or fully informed, but I wanted to share (please don't shoot the messenger).A subtle reminderThis situation has reminded me that: We are dealing with actual people We are all human Let’s break each down a bit more to set proper context. We are dealing with actual peoplePeople drive our community. Behind the keyboard is a person. No technical contribution would

For a moment, may some of the hurt and fearful in the Drupal community take a moment to pause and reflect. Take a deep breath and slow down from the continuous retweeting, reddit posts, or the most recent Drupal Confessions. (By the way, does anyone else think "Drupal Confessions" sounds like a Saturday Night Live skit or a bad emo song?) Let me begin by reminding you that some of the strongest voices are the farthest from those potentially marginalized by the Crell situation. These loud voices are drowning out the voices of those they claim to also stand up for. It's like a bad train wreck

In my previous two blog posts [one] [two], I shared my concerns and open questions over the recent events surrounding Crell and discussed my initial efforts to become informed even when full transparency does not and likely will not exist. I have formed the opinion that those seeking answers and specifics may never get the level of detail they desire, both for legal and privacy reasons. I continue to engage with others in conversation out of respect for those processing these events and out of my desire to form a well-rounded and bias-free stance. With the complexities involved, there is no

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was struggling to make sense of this situation. Was Crell treated fairly? Was he being discriminated for his beliefs? How is this possible in the confines of a community that supports diversity and inclusion? I spent parts of my day participating in discussions with team members, engaging community members, researching relevant topics, and reading responses of others that had their own questions and concerns. We are all still processing this and I ask you to please respect the diverse opinions from members in the community. In my post yesterday, I made it

When I was checking Twitter last night, a prominent community member posted a "TMI" message with a link to a blog post. This was totally off-character for a man regularly promoting thought leadership in technical capacities (why I was following him on Twitter). I was quite curious and I was immediately appalled by what I read. The post can be found here: https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-outing This created widespread outrage on Twitter, Reddit, and much more. Inevitably it was followed up by a blog post from Dries: http://buytaert.net/tag/living-our-values While totally uninformed and

I'm a huge advocate for finding ways to encourage more Drupal participants. Due to the complexity, it's unreasonable to expect people to initially pick up programming-heavy issues. This is the motivation behind the "novice" label, providing a means for identifying potentially low-complex tasks new contributors could safely pick up. The end result is usually one or more commits which are credited to you and/or your organization on Drupal.org. Commit BiasFor those looking to bolster their Drupal expertise, organizations will often look at who has "given back" to Drupal as a means of vetting. The

Since both core caching continues to evolve in Drupal 8 and contrib modules are maturing, I wanted to capture my steps for configuring Varnish 4 to properly work with Drupal 8. Set up the VCLFirst, I am NOT a systems administrator. I rely heavily on the expertise of others in the community to steer my efforts. I set up Varnish to serve up content from the Drupal site, hoping that the VCL configuration I found from Jeff Geerling would do the trick. (Reference: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/geerlingguy/drupal-vm/master/provisio…). Under your acl purge IP settings

WhyI am ashamed to admit, for the longest time I used Drupal (heck, even complained about it) but contributed absolutely nothing back. It occurred to me that, not only did I learn technical and marketable skills thanks to Drupal, my Drupal experience directly corresponded to opportunities that supported my livelihood and viability for me and my family. And, all of this occurred without one line of code from me contributed back. A long while back, I decided to make an effort to solve a core issue. At that point, I had stronger SVN experience than Git. I had approximately eight years of