Recent Blog Posts

Follow up questions to 'Don't drown in your open source project'

April 29, 2017

After I posted my presentation slides, transcript, and video from my presentation Don't drown in your open source project!, I received two follow-up questions (1, 2) on Twitter that I thought deserved a little better response than what I could do in 140 characters. So, here goes:

Do you ever abandon old projects? Thoughts on right/wrong ways?

Yes, in fact I've abandoned probably a dozen or so projects. The simplest examples:

Don't drown in your open source project!

April 27, 2017

I presented Just Keep Swimming! Or, how not to drown in your open source project at DrupalCon Baltimore 2017, as part of the Being Human track. Below is a text summary of the presentation (along with the associated slides).

Here's a video of the presentation; scroll past it to read through a transcript and slides:

And the slides/transcript:

Just Keep Swimming - Slide 2

Composer BoF at DrupalCon Baltimore

April 25, 2017

Tomorrow (Wednesday, April 25), I'm leading a Birds of a Feather (BoF) at DrupalCon Baltimore titled Managing Drupal sites with Composer (3:45 - 4:45 p.m. in room 305).

I've built four Drupal 8 websites now, and for each site, I have battle scars from working with Composer (read my Tips for Managing Drupal 8 projects with Composer). Even some of the tools that I use alongside composer—for project scaffolding, managing dependencies, patching things, etc.—have changed quite a bit over the past year.

As more and more Drupal developers adopt a Composer workflow for Drupal, we are solving some of the most painful problems.

For example:

Review: CHOETECH USB-C to DisplayPort cable

April 24, 2017

tl;dr: The cable is well-built and delivers 4K at 60 Hz without issue. And the DisplayPort end even uses the locking mechanism to ensure it's retained better—but it's also a tiny bit longer of a connector than most others, meaning it's not the best fit if your monitor needs to fit in a tight space!

When I upgraded my 2016 MacBook Pro, I decided to also replace my main external display (a 1080p 27" monitor) with a 4K UHD equivalent. Since I work on my computer all day, I find it's important to have as good a display (sharp, good color, etc.) as possible, to prevent eye strain.

4K displays are interesting beasts—there are so many pixels on these displays that even decent older laptops (like my former 2013 MacBook Air) couldn't drive a 4K display in native resolution, even if I had the proper mini DisplayPort cable.

Using Ubuntu Bash in Windows Creators' Update with Vagrant

April 10, 2017

When Microsoft announced the Windows Subsystem for Linux, now seemingly rebranded as Bash on ubuntu on Windows, I was excited at the possibility of having Drupal VM (and other similarly command-line-friendly open source projects) work better in a Windows environment. But unfortunately, the Anniversary update's version of WSL/Ubuntu Bash was half-baked, and there were a lot of little issues trying to get anything cohesive done between the Windows and Ubuntu Bash environments (even with cbwin).

Then, a year or so later, Microsoft finally announced that tons of improvements (including upgrading Ubuntu in the WSL from 14.04 to 16.04!) would be included in the 'Creators Update' to Windows 10, dropping tomorrow, April 11.

Setting up a Pi Hole for whole-home ad/tracker blocking

April 3, 2017

Pi Hole - Admin DNS query request dashboard page in Safari

Pi Hole is a nifty open source project that allows you to offload the task of blocking advertisements and annoying (and often malicious) trackers to a Raspberry Pi. The installation is deceptively simple (a curl | bash affair), but I wanted to document how I set up mine headless (just plugging the Pi into power and the network).

Set up Raspbian Lite

I bought a Raspberry Pi model 2 B along with the official Raspberry Pi foundation Case. Then I bought a Samsung Evo+ 32GB microSD card (which comes with a full-size SD card adapter), and did the following steps on my MacBook Pro to set up the Pi's OS:

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