Drupal

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, 8 June, 2016
Taipei Front-end Development Seminar

Last month, I gave the third in a series of front-end web development talks here in Taipei. The 10 attendees and I discussed style-guide-centric development and front-end development automation.

The seminar was designed to be hands-on, so we started by installing Node.js and downloading Zen 8.x-7.0-alpha8 so we could play with code while discussing the evening’s topics.

By John, 17 April, 2016
John addresses the second front-end dev talk in Taipei.

Last Friday, I gave the second in a series of front-end web development talks here in Taipei. There were 11 attendees as we discussed in length how to use the new Twig tempting system while building a Drupal 8 theme.

By John, 21 March, 2016
The participants of John's first front-end dev talk in Taipei.

Last Friday, I gave the first in a series of front-end web development talks here in Taipei. There were 11 attendees as we discussed in length how to structure a site’s styles with CSS components and Drupal 8 naming conventions.

The success of the class was entirely due to the participants who were engaged and asked lots of questions to probe their understanding of the concepts and challenge me on things that seemed a bit off on my slides. We talked for over 3 hours; here are some highlights:

By John, 17 August, 2013

Today I resigned from Palantir, a company I’ve called home for almost six years. I’ve done a lot of exciting work at Palantir, but it’s time for new challenges. I don’t even know what those new challenges are yet — I don’t have a job offer and I’m not starting my own company. (I will be trying to finish my book on Sass and Compass in between now and what happens next, so watch for that.)

By John, 11 September, 2012

At Drupalcon Munich, one of the awesome things was seeing so many people show an interest in helping out with Drupal 8’s Mobile Initiative. On the Friday after Drupalcon’s session, at that Code Sprint, there were four tables full of people helping out with JavaScript issues, Drupal’s administrative screens, responsive images, and HTML5. And, as Dries’ recent blog post shows, now is the perfect time for you to help out with the Drupal 8 Mobile Initiative.

By John, 25 May, 2012

Homebrew is pretty damn sweet if you are a developer on Mac OS X. It’s the package manager that doesn’t suck.

But the developers that run Homebrew aren’t PHP developers. And their official policy of not providing a formula (homebrew’s name for a “package”) for software already included in Mac OS X means that PHP wasn’t going to be available in Homebrew.