By John, 9 May, 2021
Tailwindcss > Bootstrap

At Drupalcon North America, I gave a presentation talking about my experience with the hot new CSS utility class system, Tailwind. I definitely learned a lot while working with it, the good, the bad, the ugly.

TLDR; Tailwind is better than Bootstrap.

The slides and video of the presentation are available in the presentations section of my website.

By John, 20 July, 2020
GraphQL in Twig queries additional data from the backend

At Drupalcon Global, I gave a presentation talking about a 3rd way to tackle rendering content from a CMS. The two standard ways are:

  1. Rendering it all on the server with the CMS, where the data provided may not match the design requirements
  2. Creating an API (JSON:API or GraphQL) on the backend that serves the data to a frontend written in JavaScript. But now you need to handle all the form handling yourself.

The third way is rendering on the server, but query for the exact data you need with GraphQL inside the server's frontend Twig files.

By John, 30 June, 2020
The Black Lives Matter rally in Taipei on June 13, 2020

For the past few weeks, I've been thinking about why large numbers of white people have finally started protesting police violence against black people. It's been obvious for years now with hundreds of videos as evidence. So why now? What about George Floyd's death was so different?

A few weeks ago, I saw a suggestion from a black man on Twitter that it was because of coronavirus; white people just have more time on their hands. That struck me as very true, but it was also disheartening as it implied “white people didn’t have anything better to do”.