People on Nerdstein

SimplyTest.me From The Ground Up

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

When I took over as the project lead for SimplyTest.me, the previous lead shared three primary things with me:

The system had a non-trivial amount of technical debt and was rising more with time

Weekend Thoughts, 9/11/21: A legacy

Sat, 11 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

On the 20th anniversary of 9-11, it’s hard to ignore how fleeting life is. What we accomplish during our time is up to us.

What do you want your legacy to be? Are you fulfilling it? Do you maintain awareness toward your goals and what impact you want to have?

Weekend Thoughts, 9/4/21: Leading through change

Sat, 11 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Changes to teams, organization, structure, or process should be thoughtful and done with patience. Change can take time to materialize. Teams often don’t like change. Making changes too frequently often doesn’t allow a team to get past the storming, norming and performing phases and therefore doesn’t allow for the expected investment to be realized.

SimplyTest.me Welcomes Matt Glaman

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

SimplyTest.me is a labor of love but it has been one of the most unique, satisfying contributions I’ve made to the community. Most of that labor has been dedicated toward maintaining the Drupal 7 version. Our maintenance was massively improved with the introduction of Tugboat.QA, but this year found major changes in the Drupal community with the launch of Drupal 9, the major changes to Composer workflows, and the Gitlab integration. All of these things are of high impact for Drupal and required major changes to SimplyTest. This has been especially hard to keep up with for me. Our latest incident showed the limitations of the current system, where SimplyTest.me was blocked from the Gitlab infrastructure due to updates in Drupal.org’s patching workflow. Much of this pulled my attention away from our aspirations to launch a new version. Until very recently, that is.

Finally! A website refresh

Mon, 28 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Let me welcome you to the new nerdstein.net. I’d like to thank Ana Laura Coto for help with the design. I’d like also thank Jonathan Daggerhart for being there when I needed an assist. I am really happy to finally share this project with the world.

Drupal Community Care Packages

Thu, 30 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Our community has always meant more than just code. These last several months have been difficult to make the same kind of connection we have come to expect from things like in-person events. And, during this time, many of us are having to juggle new challenges, may have sick loved ones, face professional or financial uncertainty, and more. I’m choosing to do something about it.

A DevOps Primer

Mon, 29 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I just closed about 100 browser tabs from an early year activity. While it’s embarrassing I left those tabs open so long (going on five months), I wanted to leave them open to reflect on what I learned. And, what a better way to reflect than a blog post.

SimplyTest.me and Google Summer of Code 2019

Thu, 07 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

SimplyTest.me is a project I continue to lead and volunteer my time to. I’m driven to help lower the barrier to entry for people in our community to contribute, use Drupal, and be a part of our community.

My 2019 Aaron Winborn Award Nomination

Wed, 06 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Season of SimplyTest

Fri, 18 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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 strive to offer the best service possible.

Mid-2018 Drupal Coffee Exchange Updates

Sat, 26 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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 complementary way to participate in our community.

Achieving Clarity in Component-based Best Practices

Mon, 02 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Here 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 conversation to have guidelines and principles we can use to have better discretion when developing component-based solutions.

2017 Conference Review

Sun, 14 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

2017 has been incredible and a year of both personal and professional growth. Events like camps and conferences are critical for me to be active in the community, as I don’t have a local group or regional meetup. In 2017, I gave more presentations than I ever expected to. I travelled to many awesome cities. I had a personal goal of giving a keynote/featured talk. I ended up giving three. I went to many places I had never seen before (both at work and through community events). I’m astonished by how much effort and care volunteers put into these events. I shared meals, craft beers, and locally roasted coffee with countless amazing individuals. I’m incredibly fortunate to have a supportive family and to work for a company that truly cares about participation and contribution to free and open source communities, like Drupal. Not only was I able to share things I’ve learned with the community, but I was able to spend time with old and new friends. I’ll have many fond memories looking back on this time and am just as excited for 2018.

Exploring simplicity in Drupal design components

Mon, 02 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Component-based architectures have become both a popular and fairly crowded space in the Drupal community. For over a year, I have followed the progress of some tools created by those leveraging Pattern Lab as a component based design library. I can’t claim to know the full breadth of problems these individuals encountered, many of which are experienced technologists in our space. But, every solution I have seen has been complex and demonstrates some architectural red flags. I wanted to take a fresh look. I paid a designer to redesign my blog for a migration to Drupal 8. This presented the perfect opportunity to try this out. Consider the following post a simple approach you might be able to use.

An Analysis of Drupal Governance

Tue, 29 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In my earlier blog post, I researched community governance in other open source communities. While it was not exhaustive, I identified a set of trends and practices communities use to serve community members. The question remains: what can Drupal learn from other communities?

Promoting Community Toxicity

Tue, 18 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Something has been bothering me and I haven’t been able to put my finger on it. I hesitated writing this. By doing so, I fully understand that some will choose to twist or misinterpret my words to further instill doubt into the community. While this is one’s right and often turns into a lengthy Twitter debate, many in the community have shied away from sharing their voice for fear of retribution.

A Drupal Contribution Non-Profit

Thu, 08 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Jrockowitz’s recent blog post on crowd sourcing, found here, sparked so many ideas for me. I wanted to discuss the most prominent idea in this blog post, the idea for a company that nurtures community contributions. Such a topic has often been on my mind and Jrockowitz post might have helped me to connect enough dots around this idea. Community members (especially maintainers) often volunteer their time and energy to community projects with little incentive aside from their will to do good.

Community Governance Considerations of Open Source Projects

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

DrupalCon was a great way to connect with the community and gauge the pulse from recent events involving Crell. After writing blog posts, I engaged with many people to share thoughts and hear perspectives. One common question that came up: what do other communities do for governance?

What Gets Me Up In The Morning

Thu, 25 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It is safe to say that people like talking about themselves. I’m guilty of that, but I don’t think I have actually given any real consideration or focus to the matter. That changed this morning.

Removing Site Building From Drupal's Vocabulary

Tue, 23 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Drupal has a full vocabulary of Drupalisms. While I think that is fine for Drupal-specific features, it also is a sign that we seem to promote our own island when there are similar concepts that exist in the technology space. When possible, we should try to align with more conventional terms that others outside of Drupal understand. If anything, this can make Drupal more approachable and better understood in broader context. I think I identified one such term: the term “Site Building” has never sat well with me - both as an activity and as a role.

Communal Action in Self and Others

Mon, 17 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes situations take time to resolve. This situation is complicated and the goal is to treat everyone respectfully. We’re beginning to see things play out now.

I want to offer some of my recent thoughts. By no means are they right or fully informed, but I wanted to share (please don’t shoot the messenger).

Civility is Community

Wed, 12 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

For a moment, may some of the hurt and fearful in the Drupal community take a moment to pause and reflect. Take a deep breath and slow down from the continuous retweeting, reddit posts, or the most recent Drupal Confessions. (By the way, does anyone else think “Drupal Confessions” sounds like a Saturday Night Live skit or a bad emo song?)

Evolving Clarity of Conduct in Technical Communities

Sat, 25 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In my previous two blog posts [one] [two], I shared my concerns and open questions over the recent events surrounding Crell and discussed my initial efforts to become informed even when full transparency does not and likely will not exist. I have formed the opinion that those seeking answers and specifics may never get the level of detail they desire, both for legal and privacy reasons. I continue to engage with others in conversation out of respect for those processing these events and out of my desire to form a well-rounded and bias-free stance. With the complexities involved, there is no one right answer and we most importantly need to respect the broader discourse in participation of moving this forward.

A Troubling Situation Indeed

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

When I was checking Twitter last night, a prominent community member posted a “TMI” message with a link to a blog post. This was totally off-character for a man regularly promoting thought leadership in technical capacities (why I was following him on Twitter). I was quite curious and I was immediately appalled by what I read. The post can be found here: https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-outing

Follow Up: A more informed opinion on our community crisis

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was struggling to make sense of this situation. Was Crell treated fairly? Was he being discriminated for his beliefs? How is this possible in the confines of a community that supports diversity and inclusion? I spent parts of my day participating in discussions with team members, engaging community members, researching relevant topics, and reading responses of others that had their own questions and concerns. We are all still processing this and I ask you to please respect the diverse opinions from members in the community. In my post yesterday, I made it clear that I was not informed about the details nor the subject matter being discussed. I feel better informed and feel a level of obligation to respond to some of my earlier points in the spirit of helping others to process this highly complex and sensitive issue.

"First" based approaches need to die

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Off the top of my head, I can name several “first”-based approaches. Do any of these ring a bell? Mobile first, content first, API first, user first, design first, experience first, modeling first, security first.

Commits on Drupal.org

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a huge advocate for finding ways to encourage more Drupal participants. Due to the complexity, it’s unreasonable to expect people to initially pick up programming-heavy issues. This is the motivation behind the “novice” label, providing a means for identifying potentially low-complex tasks new contributors could safely pick up. The end result is usually one or more commits which are credited to you and/or your organization on Drupal.org.

Lessons Learned: The "Why" and "How" of Drupal Contributions

Fri, 21 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Why

I am ashamed to admit, for the longest time I used Drupal (heck, even complained about it) but contributed absolutely nothing back. It occurred to me that, not only did I learn technical and marketable skills thanks to Drupal, my Drupal experience directly corresponded to opportunities that supported my livelihood and viability for me and my family. And, all of this occurred without one line of code from me contributed back.

Balancing Theory and Practice

Fri, 23 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

When you are building a tool, how do you measure the success of your efforts? There are data driven approaches around adoption, like number of times your tool has been downloaded or installed. Similarly, success could be defined as how effectively you solved the problem. This could be measured by the number of issues filed, the (hopefully) lack of vulnerabilities, or the number of feature requests created. But, in any measure, success is actually defined by other people. And, as an engineer, it’s such a difficult task to put yourself in their shoes. How do you deal with that?

The Technical Lift of Drupal 8

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Drupal 8 has been widely praised for improving the developer experience (DX). The “best of breed” adoption of tools (see: Symfony, Guzzle, PHPUnit, Composer, etc) clearly positions Drupal to mature and evolve beyond that which one community is able to do alone. But, there are many different considerations of DX that need explored. And, what lift is required for the community to grasp this new version? And, what is the impact?

The office is dead

Mon, 11 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I recently made a pass through historic downtown Altoona and I noticed how many buildings appeared to be empty. It actually occurred to me that my definition of infrastructure has shifted radically from the conventional infrastructure companies have adopted. The “office” is hardly a requirement for a majority of jobs.

Our fights are not your fights

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not one to really dig my heels into politics. I find it divisive and I recently had a clear example as to why.

Earlier, I heard my doorbell ring. It was a Bill Shuster promoter walking door to door in my neighborhood. I have already grown tired of his campaign, seeing television commercials with scathing attacks on Democrats, his extreme views on health care, and the flashing images of Sarah Palin and other off-the-wall conservatives he self aligns with. I was handed a pamphlet of information and needed to look no further than the cover to set me off.

"Just Enough" Planning - An Agile Concept

Wed, 02 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The Agile framework is all the rage. It aims to solve limitations introduced by waterfall. The framework is driven by value and priority, not fixed scope and heavy upfront planning. But, Agile and its Scrum variant is just a set of theories not intended to fully prescribe practice. There are many challenges that observing strict Agile/Scrum can present in practice, especially for agencies attempting to adopt it outside of a product development process.

Reliability

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Hands down, a huge pet peeve of mine is a lack of reliability.

Let me be clear, this is by no means to say that I am impatient. I often provide people countless opportunities to be reliable. But, I’ve learned over time that the more patient I am with something, the higher my expectations get.

Engineering Tenets of Agile

Wed, 21 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Background

I recently changed companies and am going through the process of onboarding. One of the big draws to the new company was an emphasis on people and culture. The whole balance between a for-profit business and a focus on employee needs, in my experience, can be in conflict. I have been learning more about how these goals are achieved.

Simple beauty of life

Thu, 16 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This morning I read this article. It’s a short phrase that stood out: simple beauty of life. This reiterates a common thread from many others with severe illness or little time left. Notably former CMU Professor Randy Pausch, who died of cancer, who left a lasting impression with his last lecture. Mitch Albom wrote a popular book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, about a life’s reflection and purpose.

My temperature is happy

Tue, 14 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This evening, my daughter and I were playing doctor. I laid on the floor and she gave me a checkup. She looked at my ears. “Better”. She checked my heartbeat. She nodded her head. And, lastly, she checked my temperature. Her response was perfect and I hope I never forget it: “My temperature is happy”.

Being present

Tue, 14 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Generally speaking, I try to be very laid back. I do get stressed out (and continue to try to work on that). However, there is one major pet peeve of mine that I believe is worth sharing. Being present.

Institutional knowledge

Sun, 11 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

No one is irreplaceable, and that is a fact. Teams often find ways to overcome the loss of staff, even creatively. Some losses hurt more than others. One key factor is institutional knowledge. This is one area that often makes employees feel irreplaceable, but should be avoided at all costs by a business.

A plea for patience

Wed, 12 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I am a big fan of learning moments. In business, some learning moments come at a cost. Some mistakes are easier to forgive than others. I still believe in exercising as much patience as possible to allow people to learn.

Routine stifles innovation

Sun, 31 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I was recently asked about what separates my company from others I have worked in the past. What immediately came to mind was the relationship with my team, the work we do, and the sheer talent. Those elements alone still make me get up in the morning. But, over a cold beer, something else struck with me. My company has no routine and I love it.

Desirable Short Term Memory

Wed, 20 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, it hit me that there are actually benefits to having a short term memory. I don’t think this is broadly applicable. In fact, I think there are more instances in which you do not want to have a short term memory. Allow me to explain…

Social Vampirism in Services

Sun, 10 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Companies are very bottom line focused. Even after a high level scope of work is determined, the most appealing bids often are on the lower end. Even if some form of a deliverable can be achieved in a given number of hours, it often does not yield the correct one. Smarter bids allocate more time for damage control, error correction, and proper testing. For low bids, especially really low ones, one has to wonder what part of the product suffers.

Serenity of thought

Thu, 24 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Rands’ recent blog post B usy is an Addiction struck a chord with me. It’s made me rethink many aspects of my day-to-day routine.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

It’s so easy to say, I’m busy. In reality, I should be working smarter, not harder. Busy is as much of a state of mind, as it is the items on your plate. It’s a routine, a lifestyle, and a shitty excuse.

A balance of trust and quality