Automate all the things
How one line in a script can save you hours of debugging agony. I recently ran into an issue with a CraftCMS plugin where the plugin worked locally but displayed bizarre behavior (404ing on a certain page) on our staging…
The role of the engagement manager
What would you say...you do here? The engagement manager (EM) is a key role at Culture Foundry. I'm going to discuss the role, but wanted to mention two key caveats: I am not an engagement manager, so I don't know…
Why we use CircleCI to build projects that don’t have any tests
Setting up a continuous integration server can help you down the path of automated deployments, even if you don't have a comprehensive test suite. We use CircleCI for our continuous integration. We set this up even for projects that have…
Develop Denver Conference Recap
A recap of my two days at Develop Denver. I recently had the opportunity to attend and speak at Develop Denver. This is a conference in Denver that covered all aspects of the development experience, from design to devops. Uniquely…
What are the benefits of remote work?
Remote work is pretty sweet. But how, specifically? At Culture Foundry, we are a 100% remote company. We have offices, but they are purely conveniences. This structure has a lot of benefits for employees. There is no commute. Every week,…
Setting up DNS Subdomain Delegation with Terraform
How do you set the default DNS NS servers for a hosted zone in Route53 using Terraform? Sometimes you want to delegate DNS resolution for a subdomain. This happened recently for one of our clients because a third party provider…
Lessons from Building an Elasticsearch Plugin for CraftCMS
Elasticsearch + Craft makes for a more flexible search experience. For one of our clients, we recently swapped out the default CraftCMS search functionality. We chose to do this because our site needed more flexibility. In particular different types of…
Creating multiple database users for Maria DB RDS
How can you create multiple database users with AWS MariaDB RDS? Not using "grant all", unfortunately. AWS RDS lets you run a database with minimal operational overhead. Backups, maintenance and operating system upgrades are all taken care of by the…
What are the challenges of remote work?
Remote work has many benefits. But what are some of the challenges you face when working remotely? Recently I posted about the benefits of remote work, from an employee perspective. There's always a flip side to any situation and in…
Context Switching: Tips to Minimize the Cost
Life comes at you fast in a digital agency. How can developers keep flowing? We are a digital consultancy with a number of clients. Some are actively under development, some are not. We have far fewer team members than clients.…