Last year, I read Jim Birch’s blog post outlining his Aaron Winborn nomination of (now) award winning Kevin Thull. As a community, we need to do our best to celebrate accomplishments and I love that this award exists. We need to tell more of our stories regardless of who gets the award. I see no reason not to share my nomination for this year’s award publicly. Contribution takes many different forms. Our community recognizes many aspects of contribution, but I believe the spirit of the Winborn award is to “think bigger”. Community members find creative ways to have impact well beyond just

Last year was spent primarily learning about SimplyTest. We did make some progress, but I think “keeping the lights on” for a system of this complexity was quite a feat after the project transfer. It’s a unique and fairly complex endeavor that bridges all elements of an open source project, a completely free service, and underlying infrastructure. I see all of the good and the bad that comes from each aspect: system maintenance, feedback from community members, customer service (Slack, Twitter, etc), system outages, and more. I recognize how valuable this service is to the community and I

Introduction Drupal 8 is a great platform for storing structured data and exposing web service endpoints. This offers Drupal a competitive advantage when creating a decoupled application or building Drupal as part of a larger enterprise of systems. Core offers many complementary out-of-the-box features to publish web services and configure them in different ways. This includes roles/permissions, Rest Web Services, Serialization, Views, and more. Since Drupal is so robust out of the box, it often minimizes the need for custom development. But, Drupal’s framework has support for any customized

It’s a classic computer science concept: Static versus Dynamic. This fundamental concept is what separates content management systems from static HTML, as a practical example. But, how does this apply to design systems like Pattern Lab and any system(s) that consume Pattern Lab artifacts? The key point to understand is around anticipated changes. What aspects of a pattern can change either based on application, anticipated updates over time, or their conditional placement? Understanding what changes are possible help drive decisions on the use of static or dynamic. Bear in mind, each pattern

We are about to start another quarter of the Drupal Coffee Exchange. Personally this has been a lot of fun to see this start from humble beginnings and an off-the-cuff idea posted to Twitter to now have a growing membership and have been running for over a year now. We now have international participation and are looking to expand that. For me, it’s yet another reminder our community goes well-beyond the commits. Now we have a way for community members to stay caffeinated and share our favorite coffees between community enthusiasts. It’s unique, it’s fun, and it’s become a creative and

IntroductionHere we are. It’s been over a year now that our community has explored design components (integration of design systems, pattern libraries, etc) and Drupal. The community has shared different tools and solutions, presentations from many individuals representing different companies and perspectives, and processes/workflows that enable the different teams and disciplines. I would classify the time spent to date as research, exploration, and innovation. While this is expected for something new, we need to define best practices. The purpose of this blog post is to help us start a

I am a huge fan of both Penn State Football and the Pittsburgh Steelers teams. The Steelers have shown favoritism to early-round Big Ten players (e.g. Shazier, Cam Heyward, Artie Burns) but they don't seem to routinely select Penn State players based on what I believe to be differences in systems and/or philosophies (Jesse James being one recent counter-example to this). Saquon Barkley is a generational talent that all teams should be vying for. The Steelers recently announced they were putting talks on-hold with LeVeon Bell so their staff could focus on the upcoming draft. Is there a chance