Development

There's a few problems with setting up shop on the web. All of your competitors are right next door. You're in the worst neighborhood, with crooks inventing new tools to break in every day. That parking lot you just built now has to accommodate scooters and semi trucks.

1. EMBRACE YOUR INNER PESSIMIST...

This doesn't mean you can't be your usual, happy-go-lucky self! In fact, it's absolutely vital that you approach any project with a healthy 'yes we can' attitude.

At Freelock we're in the midst of building dashboards for ourselves and for customers, to really dial in our process and let us know where to focus our improvements.

Hey, that's not what I was thinking!

That's a very common complaint customers have with developers, when they receive the result of weeks or months of hard work. And it indicates a failure of planning.

At Freelock, we've been adopting a pattern for git branch management called Git Flow. If you haven't run across git flow before, go check out this article to get the basic concepts: A successful Git branching model.

As part of our recent site upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, we had a bunch of content profiles to clean up.

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.

We've had several clients recently chafing at how confining Drupal sites can be -- it can be a lot more work to make individual pages vary from the template, and if you have build web sites using a tool like Dreamweaver, you can't tweak the layout the same way.

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post on why customers complain about Drupal -- the short version is that they either had incorrect expectations, or "developers" who were in over their heads.