DevOps

Its name is Watney. Watney lives in Matrix. Watney is a bot I created about 6 months ago to start helping us with various tasks we need to do in our business.

Watney patiently waits for requests in a bunch of chat rooms we use for internal communications about each website we manage, each project we work on. Watney does a bunch of helpful things already, even though it is still really basic -- it fetches login links for us, helps us assemble release notes for each release we do to a production site, reminds us when it's time to do a release, and kicks off various automation jobs.

Drupal 8 has been out for 2 months now, and there's never been a better time to choose Drupal for your website platform. Here are 8 reasons why!

Today marks the release of Drupal 8, and the birthday of its founder, Dries Buytaert. This release is more than just a new digit, it's an entirely new platform with something for everyone to love, but it's particularly big for web site owners.

What's the big deal? The biggest, most powerful, one of the most successful open source projects in the world has two major, fundamental changes that change everything you thought you knew about it.

Well, not everything. Lots of the things that people love about Drupal are getting some nice improvements:

Here are the slides from my 2015 Drupal Summit talk, Quality Drupal DevOps!

You can also click here to open in a new window, full screen.

Faster, more secure, more maintainable. Three nice benefits we get from our new standard Drupal server architecture.

More and more I keep running into assertions that Git is a version control tool, and that if you use it for deployment, you're doing it wrong.

Why?

At Freelock we find it to be a very effective deployment tool, and I'm not seeing a solution that meets our needs any better.

Two presentations in particular caught my attention recently mentioned this:

Another sales call today, with a prospective start-upper who thought Drupal might lower his costs to get a web startup launched.

... this statement applies to just about any endeavor you can imagine... I've mostly heard it associated with education, the idea that you can get a good education anywhere if you work diligently at it and learn what the teacher has to teach -- and likewise, you can often skate by in good schools without coming out the other end with much learned.

After using the latest Ubuntu Long Term Support release (14.04) on my laptop for the past few weeks, I upgraded my home workstation on Friday. And hit a few upgrade challenges I thought worth jotting down for posterity (and the next poor sucker who can't find an answer on Google).