Blog

Case study: connecting independent systems and modernizing the storefront for an established online retailer.

Case study: tracing intermittent slowdowns and outages in a large Drupal site, including an application that could deadlock itself.

Case study: Using large language models and structured document navigation to make complex technical standards easier to interpret.

An interactive toy that draws one simple rule on a circle, and the surprisingly rich patterns that come out of it.

Syntax notes on Ruby ecosystem Some notes, on syntax in the Ruby ecosystem, namely Ruby itself, ERB and Rails. Ruby Comments # single line comment =begin Multi Line Comment The =begin and =end must be at the beginning of the line =end # or just # do multiline # like this Too bad multiline comments are a bit clunky ERB ERB (Embedded Ruby) is a templating system for embedding Ruby code within a text document like HTML. ...

It can be useful to define custom entities programatically for streamlined CRUD webapps using Drupal. One nice thing about doing it this way is that you can keep all your entity definitions in the code, so deployment is easier - no clicking around on the various environments to keep things synced or akward db sync scripts. Sometimes a custom entity needs to have a hidden field that should not be exposed in the user-facing create/edit form. It might have a value that’s handled programatically, like a timestamp for when the entity was published, or in my case, a special kind of “owner” that differs from the entity creator. ...

I was hitting a roadblock trying to get a sites metatags nice for social sharing, using the Metatags module. In the past I’ve written code to manually generate the meta tags, but thought this time around I would see if I could not reinvent the wheel. I started to regret my decision when it seemed like tokens for images don’t allow you to serve up derivative images using Image styles. This meant that the only option was to present the image that was uploaded in the raw form - not always what you want. In my case it seemed like some of the source images used by my client were so large that Formerly Twitter ™ was failing to scrape the image because of a timeout or some other limit on their end. ...

Hot reloading for the dockerized Rails and Tailwind app

Adding Tailwind to the basic Rails app

Building a React-based feature in a Drupal context

Setting up the groundwork for React and Sass development in a WordPress environment

A little trick for declaring cache variance directly in Drupal templates

Integrating Tailwind, LiveReload, and SCSS, with Drupal Theme Development

Drupal the programatic way - display the translated value of a dropdown or radio select field

Drupal the programatic way - display the human readable value of a dropdown or radio select field

Walkthrough of a basic Rails setup using Docker

Examples showing how Markdown behaves in Hugo

A walkthrough tutorial of how to set up a blog like this one

How I came to choose Hugo for my blogging framework

Why I took up blogging like it’s 2004