I recently finished reading "Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems". This book, also known as the SRE book, is full of thought-provoking and useful advice, even for teams running systems smaller than Google's infrastructure (which is pretty much…
We are using Craft CMS for a client website that is too complicated for Wordpress and not complex enough for Drupal. One of the great things about Craft is that they've thought about how to move configuration from development to production.…
For a recent hackfest, I experimented with Alexa, Amazon's voice UX software offering. Specifically, I tried to add a skill to Alexa. For an idea of what you can do with skills, you can check out the Amazon Alexa Blueprints. However,…
What is Gutenberg Ever since the first version, WordPress has had one editor field to rule them all. Developers have since hacked and pushed in more functionality with plugins and leveraging short-codes in increasingly creative ways. Finally, WordPress is aiming…
Code review is a key part of our development process. All code changes should go through code review before they are released. Sometimes it feels hard to justify waiting for another developer to take the time to do a code…
Ah, documentation. Whenever starting a project or picking one up, I love to read the docs. However, someone has to write and maintain those documents. Depending on who the audience is (and how big the company is), it may be…
Recently, we ran into a bizarre issue with a Drupal7 installation that we work on, but don't fully control. A module was pulling a remote JSON API and presenting it inside the Drupal application. To retrieve the API, we were…
I was setting up some AWS IAM users in Terraform recently and ran smack into an issue that reminded me of the power and the peril of AWS. The issue at hand was ensuring that every user signed in with…
Rails has a great set of tools for managing database changes. These are called Active Record migrations and they were revolutionary when first implemented in the mid 2000s. I remember a friend saying that Rails had solved the "how do…
We do all of our development using git, and most of our projects are hosting on Github. The pull request (PR) is a key part of our dev process, and writing excellent PR descriptions helps code reviewers and folks doing…
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