Posts from April 2012
Intro to Github Pull Requests
If your company is hosting code in Github, I sure hope you aren't committing directly to master. This quick screencast demonstrates how to use pull requests so that teammates can review code before it gets merged into the master branch.
Make sure you turn on HD so that the text is legible.
Big Career News
Exciting but sad news:
On Monday, I'm joining Lullabot as a Drupal developer. Tomorrow is my last day at Jackson River.
I am thrilled to be joining Lullabot. Not long after I began working with Drupal a little over two years ago, I knew that I wanted to one day work for the company. I was able to get up to speed quickly thanks to their training videos, I learned how to build modules properly at the Deep Dive Week, and I learned about Drupal 7 during the Webchick tour: Lullabot has been instrumental in getting me into the Drupal world, and I knew from the first time that I met some of the 'bots that I wanted to work with them one day. I even mentioned it on Eaton's blog about this time last year:
Is it weird that I aspire to one day be a Lullabot?
I've met parts of your crew a few times: the module deep-dive week, the Webchick tour, Chicago. Every time, I've impressed by how friendly you guys all are. I mean, you're like Drupal celebrities, but you're still REGULAR PEOPLE. And of course, you guys have fantastic talent and do interested work.
I think that at any given time, there are a handful of companies that one holds up as the gold standard of places to wrok. For a lot of people, it has been IBM, Microsoft, Apple, or any other major tech player; up until a few years ago, I hoped I could get good enough to work for Google. These days, Lullabot is that company for me. It's hard to articulate why; there's just the sense that it's a good company of good people that know what they're doing and are passionate about all things Drupal. And in an asbtract sense, I guess, that's actually what I aspire to be.
Obviously, I'm incredibly excited to be joining the 'bots and can't wait to see what I'm going to get into starting next week, but I'm certainly going to miss everyone at Jackson River. I've spent the past two years working with a fantastic team there and made a lot of great friends. During an interview, I was asked why I was looking to leave Jackson River and could honestly say that I wasn't: I wasn't looking for a new job and wasn't planning on leaving JR, but this is the goal that I've had in my sights for some time, and I'm thankful to have arrived sooner than expected.
It's a bittersweet transition, but mostly sweet. My time at Jackson River was wonderful, but I'm looking forward to new challenges and opportunities.
Oh, and for what it's worth: both Jackson River and Lullabot are hiring. I can personally recommend the former, and have heard only good things about the latter ;-)
QuickPost Bookmarklet on Dreamhost VPS with Suhosin
This is probably the third time I've fixed this problem, so it seemed time to write down the solution.
On my personal sites, I make use of one my own modules, QuickPost Bookmarklet. The module geenrates a bookmarklet that allows you highlight text on a page and begin a new blog post on your own site from it.
My sites are hosted on a Dreamhost VPS, and once in a while, this bookmarklet stops working on me: if I select a longer piece of text, it won't pre-fill the body text area on the node add form. The title value still works, but not the body, suggesting that the server was ignoring (rather than truncating) that query value if it's too long.
The problem lies with Suhosin, which is enabled (I think?) by default. The offending setting is suhosin.get.max_value_length, which keeps getting set back to 512. I'm not exactly sure how it works, because I found that the values in the query string actually stopped working somewhere around 700 characters, but no matter.
The fix was just to add a line to my php.ini file. On my VPS, this is located at /etc/php53/php.ini.
suhosin.get.max_value_length = 10000
Restart Apache, and you're good to go.
Category:
Inexperienced Drupal Developer
From Inexperienced Drupal Developer:
I've recently noticed there are a ton of local Drupal jobs looking for experienced developers, and also a ton of awesome, but inexperienced developers looking for jobs. This seems like a problem. If people can't get experience in jobs, they can't get jobs that need experience. I'm hoping to help solve this problem by posting the job I've never seen. I'm seeking an inexperienced Drupal developer.
This is a FANTASTIC idea. We all know that the Drupal world needs more developers: every shop in every town is hiring. Scott's approach is a great way to get someone started off, and I'll bet that he's received a torrent of email already.
The question is, how can we make this bigger? It sounds like Scott is pretty much funding this little project himself, but surely there are Drupal shops around who would be willing to spend a little money to invest in future talent. Perhaps we could even convince a couple of smaller companies to chip in 20-25% of a normal salary, and jointly hire an inexperienced developer to work part-time on contrib modules that the companies would benefit from—that way, everybody gets something out of it.
If you work for or know of companies that might be interested in such a venture, send them a link to this job post and see if you can convince them to give it a try.
Category:
The Boston Initiative in DC
Last night, a handful of us in DC got together to discuss bringing the Boston Initiative to DC. My notes are on the DC group, with links to lots of additional info for those unfamiliar with the project.
I expected a pretty quick planning meeting: how often can we do sprints, where can we hold them, who wants to help organize them, etc. Instead, we quickly got off on a tangent about the merits of LearnDrupal.org and concerns about the content, how it's structured, and whether it's just duplicating existing training materials.
I was a bit frustrated by the way it went, but after sleeping on it, I'm really happy it did.
See, I went into this with motives of my own. The whole point of the Boston Initiative is to get more developers involved in Drupal core development, but I hoped that holding some training sessions ("learn sprints," in the parlance of the initiative) would help to attract other, non-Drupal developers into the fold, and maybe even non-developers who are just interested in learning more about Drupal. I figured that even if people only made it up the first few rungs of the Drupal Ladder, it would at least get them started and involved in the community, and we all know that there is a serious need for more Drupal site builders and developers.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can admit that this was pretty stupid. I was trying to co-opt the Boston Initiative to make it fit my own goals. I think that my own expectations probably helped to push the conversation in that direction last night, but it was the wrong way to be approaching this project. There are plenty of existing training options out there for Drupal, but this initiative is not about training people to use Drupal: it's about getting developers involved in the Drupal core, with clear step-by-step instructions and milestones.
So I'm glad it went that way. I know now that when planning learning and issue sprints, I need to make sure that I'm clear about what kind of learning can be expected—or perhaps more importantly, what should not be expected. It would still be great to get more people started with Drupal, but that's a task for a different initiative.
