Once your site’s database dump file gets to be 1GB or more, phrases like “oh, just download and import a DB dump” can’t really be taken for granted anymore. So here are some tips for dealing with large databases, especially those of the Drupal variety. Exporting Before we can import, we must export. With a […]
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Drupal’s productivity curve
There are a lot of things that make Drupal projects unique from your typical software development projects, but one of the most interesting to me is the productivity curve. Specifically, Drupal projects tend to have lots of visible progress at the start and then things slow down considerably. In contrast, many (most?) non-Drupal projects are […]
This post was originally published on the Phase2 blog. Think back to your most successful project. The one that was on time and on budget with a happy client and work that everyone could be proud of. Chances are, that team worked really well together, right? Did the members of that team all have a lot of […]
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Drupal 7 Deconstructed
For years now I’ve wanted to dig through Drupal core, line by line, and understand how the big pieces do what they do. I’m finally doing that, and writing up my notes as I go. Drupal 7 Deconstructed is the in-progress result of that. If you’ve ever wondered what happens in the bootstrap process, or how […]
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Making the most of Post Mortems
You’re woken up at 4am to the lovely sound of your phone ringing. You answer, and a robotic voice tells you that an outage has been detected on your current project’s site and you’re the person on call this week, you lucky duck! You roll your grumbling self out of bed, plop into your computer […]
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Drushful thinking
What is Drush? If you’re asking that question right now then congratulations! You are one of the lucky people who will have your life changed today! Cancel everything and read up on Drush, the command line bridge to Drupal. Everybody knows about Drush, ya Dingus! That’s more like it. Who doesn’t love Drush, right? Right! But […]
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Contrib-minded development
It’s common practice for people who use open source software (including Drupalers, ahem ahem) to submit back to the community for the sake of the others building and using that software. It’s the right thing to do, it’s what open source is all about, and so on – you’ve heard that all before. But sometimes it’s […]
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Always be respondin’
My #1 absolute top priority as tech lead for any given project is to make sure everyone else has everything they needed to be as productive as possible. A huge part of this just means answering every freaking question ASA-FREAKING-P so that “blocked while waiting for feedback” doesn’t happen, even if your “answer” is just […]
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Drupal and “Invented Here”
We’ve all heard the term Not Invented Here (NIH) thrown around. It refers to a phobia of using technologies that weren’t developed in-house. What some of us might be a little less familiar with is its opposite, Invented Here (IH), which occurs when people are uncomfortable innovating in-house or developing anything for themselves. IH is a huge problem […]
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Take advantage of Drupal upgrades
Drupal’s upgrade mantra has always been “we will break your code but we won’t break your data” and for that reason, Drupal core and contrib maintainers typically spend a lot of time and effort in providing upgrade paths for your data so you can theoretically just run the upgrade script and update your code and […]
