Drupal

It's my 20th Drupalversary! drupal.org/u/john-albin-wilkins

20 years ago I was looking for an open source CMS because I was tired of building everything on my own. I have never once regretted joining the Drupal community. We are so much more than a group of web developers.

Thank you to all the wonderful people I have befriended and worked with these past 20 years. I literally couldn’t have done it without all of you — that’s how Open Source works!

I just spoke with the good folks at the Talking Drupal podcast to discuss my recent work on the Next Drupal project. Next Drupal is both a collection of Drupal modules to aid content editors with decoupled websites and a JavaScript tool to integrate Next.js with Drupal’s JSON:API or GraphQL capabilities.

We’re currently doing a major upgrade to version 2 of the JavaScript tool to work with the newest features of Next.js. And we need more contributors!

At Drupalcon Europe, I gave a presentation very dear to my heart. It's the most personal introspective presentation I've given on Web Accessibility.

I hope it can also be a call to action for all of us to do better.

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

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.

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.

So…how many Drupal people know the reason why officials were afraid the Indian Ministry of Defence website was hacked by the Chinese? 😂

From the Ministry of Defence website hacked, Chinese characters spark cyberattack speculation article on the India news site, Zee News:

Ministry of Defence website hacked, Chinese characters spark cyberattack speculation

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.

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.

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:

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.)