📘 Understanding Drupal: A Complete Guide to Caching Layers — my new book is out now!
Drupal's cache.backend.chainedfast makes your site faster without any configuration. All you need is to have APCu on your server. It shows up in the bootstrap, config, and discovery cache bins, and most developers never think about it or even know it is being leveraged.
When making code changes or fixing issues, it's easy to leave @todo comments behind. Sometimes they mark areas waiting on an upstream fix, sometimes they're reminders that never got revisited. Either way, they accumulate — and the ones tied to the specific issue you're working on should be resolved before the MR merges.
After starting in early 2023 and having a long hiatus from writing, my book Understanding Drupal: A Complete Guide to Caching Layers is now published on LeanPub! Three years ago (😱), I started working on this book that I wanted to self-publish.
Drupal's role-based access control is one of its strengths. Permissions and roles are well-understood, and the system is mature. But the moment you step outside the standard cookie-based session — say, into OAuth with the authorization code flow — you hit a wall that the core permission model never anticipated.
By default, drush updb clears the cache after applying database updates. For deployments where you want to avoid an unnecessary performance hit, you can prevent this default behavior using a Drush pre-command hook. The updb command has a --cache-clear flag that you can set up in your CI workflow, but what about local testing?
AI was a big topic at the EvolveDigital Summit last week. AI is also a big part of my day-to-day work. I've been thinking more and more about what it means for me as a software engineer.
I can't believe it's already time for DrupalCon Vienna!
I'll be presenting on Wednesday at 4:15pm with Dripyard's Mike Herchel about How to Land an EPIC Contribution in Drupal (Without Losing Your Mind). We'll talk about some of the contributions we've been able to get committed together and empower others to team up and fix the quirks and irks they have with Drupal!
Over the summer, Acquia launched the product I have been working on: Acquia Source. This is the first event I'll be at since it launched and can't wait to talk about it. Curious? Find me at our booth or in the hallway and ask!
If you've been a user of Simplytest, I've just completed a round of maintenance, and everything should be up and running again. The service must have been spamming the Drupal.org APIs and caused itself to get blocked. I've worked with the DA team, and now Simplytest can make API requests again to get project and release data.