matt glaman

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.

The 0.7.0 release was housekeeping — fixing the release notes command and clearing out deprecation warnings. 0.8.0 has two goals: add native GitLab issue fork and merge request commands, and make the CLI useful for developers using AI agents to assist with Drupal.org issues.

I maintain drupal-mrn.dev, a tool widely used by maintainers to generate release notes for Drupal modules. It simplifies the changelog process, but consuming those notes has remained a manual step for site architects reviewing updates.

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.

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.

For the past few years, I've been struggling to acknowledge that I have a disability. It's not something new. I've grown up this way. I just never called it a disability because I always thought, "Well, it could be worse," or "It's not as bad as others have it".