I know it can be easy to pass by my Twitter or Facebook profile pic and think that I’m virtue signaling and that this wave of anti-Asian violence doesn’t affect me since I’m just a white guy.

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.

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”.

Tamir Rice’s birthday is June 25, same as mine. He was born 4 days before my son was born. My son and him are almost exactly the same age. Or they would have been if a racist system hadn’t murdered Tamir for playing with a toy gun. Tamir would have turned 18 this month. Tamir would have been leaving his parent’s home and starting out his life as an adult. My son gets to do all those things. Tamir does not.

Edit: My son, Owen, just pointed out that George Floyd was my age. Born in 1973.

At the most recent SingaporeCSS’ Talk.CSS meetup, I gave a presentation about how Sass’ cool nesting feature is finally coming to CSS. While it hasn't been implemented in any browser yet, we'll discuss the spec and how to start using it today in your CSS.

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