Dev Corner

There's a huge range of skills that come to mind when somebody asks for a web developer, and when you start looking for Drupal developers, it gets even more complicated.

Drupal developer, module developer, back end developer, what does that mean?

In the world of software and web development simplicity is a funny thing. We are always striving to make our work and our product simple: simple to understand, simple to use, and simple to maintain. This is one of the many reasons we use Drupal as our development framework here at Freelock.

Over the past couple weeks, I've updated the Drupal Dojo Toolkit module to support the new AMD module layout and asynchronous loading.

Via the Seattle Tech Startups list, I came across probably the most vehement, well-written, detailed critique of the PHP language I have seen yet.

The rest of my team may not agree with me, but I greatly prefer the Dojo Toolkit to jQuery, when it comes to Javascript libraries. Why? Perhaps it's because I want to justify the hundreds of hours I've spent learning and re-learning the API as it continues to evolve.

Drupal provides powerful tools that makes it easy to do all sorts of changes to your web site, but one change is difficult: changing the content type of a node after you've created it.

We regularly import content from old web sites and systems.

One of my projects in the past few weeks has been to put together a SOAP server for a client. So suddenly I've had to learn a lot of the nitty gritty details about what works and what doesn't...

While they're fresh, let me jot them down here. WARNING: Extremely technical content ahead.

PHP development is one of our specialties at Freelock Computing. I've written quite a few PHP applications, some from scratch, some starting with other people's code, some as extensions for open source projects.

Before code can be customizable, it must be clear. But clarity is not enough, if you're going to be using a codebase in multiple places.

Programming is an exercise in understanding a problem. To program effectively, you need to fully understand, in intricate detail, the problem your program is solving. Sometimes as a programmer you don't fully understand the problem until you've wrestled with it a few times in code.