Our blog posts from June 2019

Orange sunglasses on the sand with sun shining behind them
Drupal

Here’s a quick recap of our blog posts from last month. Check it out and revisit your favorite ones!

 

Interview with Mario Hernandez of Mediacurrent: Contributing to Drupal through workshops and training

We began with another interview in our Drupal Community Interviews series; for this one, we talked with Mario Hernandez, Senior Frontend Developer at Mediacurrent. He was first acquainted with the power of Drupal in 2007 when he was working for the Federal Government.

Even then, during version 6, he was impressed with Drupal’s powerful backend which allowed him to focus on the frontend with which he has more experience. One of his favorite recent developments is the shift from PHP templates to the Twig template engine.

But Mario’s proudest contribution doesn’t have that much to do directly with code - what he enjoys the most is actually providing training and conducting workshops, especially at smaller events where people are very eager to learn. Mediacurrent’s plan is to expand their offerings and start providing custom training that goes beyond just Drupal

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Burnout: Symptoms of developer burnout & ways to tackle it

Moving on, we have a somewhat longer blog post that deals with burnout; namely, how to spot the symptoms of burnout when managing a team of developers and what measures to take to prevent burnout from occurring and/or alleviate it when it does occur. 

While burnout is a general problem for workers, it’s especially relevant in the development industry, with higher and higher demands for developers (and from these developers). The first step to preventing it is to be on the lookout for its symptoms, such as lack of energy/motivation, isolation, a decreased quality of work, etc. 

Other preventive measures include a pleasant working environment, enough exercise and motivation, as little overtime as possible and generally a healthy work-life balance. On the individual level, the most important thing is enjoying your work and knowing your limits.

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Interview with Cindy McCourt, Drupal trainer and author

Our second community interview in June featured Cindy McCourt, consultant at IDCM Innovations, Drupal trainer and author. Even when she discovered Drupal in version 4.5, Cindy knew that Drupal was going in the right direction by offering what she calls a data management system rather than a page management system. 

Having managed numerous HTML pages, she knows the importance of code and content reuse, as well as the power of databases and what it takes to integrate websites and databases. Because of Drupal’s powerful capabilities in this area, choosing to work with it was a no-brainer for her.

As a trainer, Cindy emphasizes the importance of good and respectful communication within the Drupal community, pointing out that Drupal is free because a lot of people have dedicated their free time and effort to the project, without necessarily having to. 

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Recap of Acquia's webinar on Content as a Service

The last post we wrote in June was a recap of Acquia’s webinar on content as a service, titled “Shifting from Single Channel to Multichannel Content”. Dries Buytaert and Jake Wilund talked about the challenges of multichannel content and presented Acquia’s upcoming CaaS solution, Content Cloud

Since people consume content through different channels across their digital journey, it’s important to produce content that works and is relevant across all these channels. There are three steps crucial to this: standardizing content structures across systems and channels; auditing existing content repositories; and defining the roles and responsibilities involved

Some of the features that stood out the most from the Content Cloud demo were API-first, easy inclusion of rich media and easy maintenance of content through multiple systems. If you can’t wait for the official release, you can sign up for beta access here.

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Flags (or ribbons) of all colors blowing in the wind with sky and trees behind

 

We hope you liked revisiting our content from June. If you don’t want to miss any of our posts, make sure to check our blog every once in a while - we’re sure you’ll find something that interests you!