Hear the story of a new stakeholder
Who asks for a seemingly simple tweak
And is answered by a chain of scolders,
Each too siloed to find what they all seek.
The CMS is not the entirety of your project; it is one of many packages that your project depends on.
I find the Hype Cycle so emotionally loaded, I had to make a gif about it.
Sometimes I'm in the mood to read deeply. When I edited the study guide for our certification test, I printed out over 200 pages of a PDF. I read closely. I made notes in pen. I translated those notes into Google Docs suggestions, and then I read a bunch more.
Most of the time I'm not in that mood.
The lowest form of DevRel is telling.
Ya gotta start somewhere, so tell me what
Your product does. Please refrain from yelling.
Too many get stuck in the telling rut.
Our clients certainly didn’t care much about how object caching got installed. They wanted their sites running fast, of course, but they expect more of our billable hours to be spent on the tickets that could see the end results more tangibly than shaving milliseconds.
When you hypothesize and then concoct
a product change, ask DevRel if it'll blend.
Does the message change with the medium?
We must ask again: what are we doing?
The theme() function could return us plain lists,
Or 10 preprocess layers for viewing
More divs than should possibly exist.
Conway’s law rules everything around me:
Organizations designing systems
Replicate their communication tree.
Old insights hold true in modern prisms.
Describe software from the stakeholders’ view.
That’s what BDDers do more than they
Automate tests or fix the failing hues.
Forget red to green apples. Thrive in grey.
You need three things to earn coworkers’ trust:
Empathy, logic, Authenticity
Form a stable stool that you can adjust.
But the stool wobbles in toxicity.
Deploying a container is significantly faster than provisioning a virtual machine. And the "cold start" times that annoy container-based solutions are melting away in the next generation WebAssembly and V8-based deployments.
However broad or narrow a web professional's specialization may be, success for the whole team often depends on the individuals having enough time and space to look past the edges of their focus.
most of our community will likely find more success with the Server-Side Rendering model that is closer to what WordPress and Drupal have done for 20 years.
We have heard too many horror stories of teams needing too many (figurative) band-aids on their decoupled sites because there was too much bleeding on the bleeding edge.
I saw a similarity between these three surgical checklists for moments to catch errors and three times in my workday that I needed to check myself.
Each area of technology has its preferred abstraction layers.
Whatever stage your project is in there is almost certainly a way you can save time or make your site less likely to break by offloading some of your quality assurance to a computer.
With performance data in hand, you can have informed conversations with your clients about the impact of certain features on the overall site performance.
As much fun as it is to curl for HTTP headers, I don't want to be doing that manually to test over the long term. I'd rather write a more readable version in Behat.
Before leveraging the underlying Drupal cache metadata system in this way, many sites would just clear all of their caches with every node save.
Spending time thinking about how to make a joke with a piece of technology requires thinking about it in different ways.
Once team members know that the robots are handling that part of the review, they can focus on more thoughtful feedback.
I’ve been hearing about the marvels of services for years as Drupal 8 was developed. I had never replaced a service for a real site. I’m glad it worked as well as promised.
I list this option first because it requires the least effort.
I think the main lesson I’m learning here is that I do still need regression tests for my migrations.
Of the three, the database is easiest element to mess up and the hardest to fix after a mistaken change.
So it’s a typical side project. Some parts are handled with great care. Some are sloppy and out of date.
In September 2015 I was very excited to join Pantheon.