Up until today actually, I've always used Dexpot which is a very well made Virtual Desktop application much like Compiz in Linux. It has a lot of the same bells and whistles for managing/spiffying up your virtual desktop experience… except, Windows 8 and Windows 10 have some really debilitating bugs around the start menu. Additionally, you can't always expect all applications to play nice with it. I have particular issues with ConEmu. Read more about my Windows Development setup in a previous blog post.

For those of you who are like me and have been working on a Mac, you know that you can either have BOTH your trackpad and your mouse with Natural Scrolling or not … So for myself, I can't stand having to do things two different ways. It's hard enough to go back and forth between CTRL + C and ⌘ + C, so I standardize where I can.

I was asked by a client to explain Relevancy as they didn't understand why adding an additional word to their query was actually causing a result to not show up (at least at the top of the list) as they expected. It turned out the actual discussion wasn't about relevancy at all, but And and Or and how they are used in Solr.

At Promet, I'm an avid Composer user with Drupal. With that said, we are now starting Drupal 8 sites for clients, camp sites, and even ourselves. With that said, Doug Dobrzynski recently made some changes to the Promet framework (on his own time) that allows it to work with Drupal 8. You can see it over on Github.

As a pretty avid Mac / Linux user, I get stuck in my ways. However, every once in a while I get an itch to do something different, just so I can see how those that I'm teaching are affected by some of the changes that I make. This includes the realm of the Windows PHP Developer. With that said I thought it handy to go about sharing some of the tools that I use to develop with to make my Windows environment more like the environments I'm used to.

If yall are like me, you have all started using composer for all of your Drupal dependency management. This is all through the work of webflow and his maintenance on packagist.drupal-composer.org.

I did run into a problem recently:

{
  require-dev: {
    "drupal/api": "7.*",
  }
}

This yields the following error

At work, there has been lots of work making our code repos smaller for the fact that we would love our code reviews to only contain that in which we maintain. This means, all 3rd party code shouldn't be stored in our git repositories, and the changes that matter will not go unnoticed. To that end, Will Milton has went through some pretty pain staking development to get existing drupal modules into a packagist. This works with all versions of Drupal, as it's essentially, just Composer!

The following is a repost of an article I did for Promet Source.

Drupal 8 features unit level testing which will improve Promet's Continuous Integration practices.

At MidCamp (Midwest Drupal camp), I found out a really fascinating thing about Drupal 8: Support for PHPUnit is going to be part of the base distribution. This means a great deal to Solutions Architects and Developers at Promet because we have been striving to integrate automated tests into our build. Perhaps you remember from my talks or previous posts, number four of my 10 Principles of Continuous Integration is "Self-Testing Build". This makes Drupal a much more sought-after platform for shops looking to fully embrace Continuous Integration.

I was sitting here thinking tonight that there must be a strong use case for male and female default avatars since there are several sites out there with users that with to remain "anonymous" but give enough information to determine their gender. I mulled over trying to make a module out of this but I don't think it would be advantageous enough to fix this customization to only 2 options and some how tying that to a field in the profile. So I decided to blog about how you could program this yourself.