Technology
Give ‘Future You’ the gift of documentation
August 14, 2018
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…
Weeding Your Website: The Unglamorous but Essential Task of Regular Platform Updates
August 8, 2018
If you think of your website as a garden, outdated versions of your CMS (whether WordPress, Drupal, MODX or Craft) — and their associated outdated plugins or modules — are essentially the weeds. Thanks to the constant evolution of these…
Issues with Accessing a Remote API in Drupal7
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…
The power and peril of AWS: IAM edition
July 30, 2018
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 Migrations, Done Manually
July 24, 2018
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…
Standardizing your PRs with Github Pull Request Templates
July 9, 2018
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…
The Culture Foundry Development Process
July 3, 2018
This is an overview of the Culture Foundry development process. This process is continuously evolving (so this is a snapshot), but is aimed at creating quality websites and web applications while balancing the needs of our clients for speed. It's…
Troubleshooting Caching
June 19, 2018
As they say, in computer science there are two hard problems: naming things, cache invalidation and off by one errors. Ba-dum-bum. At Culture Foundry we use caches extensively. Sometimes they are built into the application frameworks. Other times they are…
Serverless Scaling With S3
June 13, 2018
At Culture Foundry, we have some clients who see intense traffic spikes due to "real world" events. For this scenario, we've written a server-less solution that scales well at a reasonable cost (both in terms of dollars and developer time).…
Configuring MODX Revolution To Scale Horizontally
June 9, 2018
MODX Revolution is a PHP CMS with tons of functionality out of the box. It also has a lot of flexibility. Like most PHP CMSes, it uses a relational database to store data and puts file uploads on the filesystem.…
