Drupal integration patterns

As Drupal has evolved, it has become more than just a CMS. It is now a fully fledged Web Development Platform, enabling not just sophisticated content management and digital marketing capabilities but also any number of use cases involving data...

Apollo, an open-source platform for running your apps

Today we are releasing Apollo - A platform for running your next generation web services and applications. This is a project that we have been experimenting with internally to power microservices and big data platforms for our clients. Apollo is...

Code Beauty

When was the last time you or a colleague looked at some code and made a comment about its attractiveness? You may have said that some code was “ugly” or, if you were more fortunate, you might have called it...

Microservices Gotchas

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti Microservice, far from it. Come and ask me and I’ll give you a lot of reasons why they can benefit any development project. And there are plenty of posts on the web and...

When It's Clever to Admit That You're Not Feeling Clever

On the first day of my first professional job, an experienced colleague gave me a piece of advice which has served me well for many years: Admit it when you don’t know the answer Simplistically, this works because it prevents...

Risk Burndown

Few Agile approaches actively manage risk. There are some tools to help with risk, such as sprints, Definition of Done, etc. but there are few tools that are explicit about risk. Risk burndown is an approach I have used to...

Why Microservices Are Right For Us

I posted previously about the fact we’re “doing” Microservices. At that time I was hedging pretty extensively (as various commenters pointed out). This was predominantly because we we’re pathfinding (or at least broadening the paths for the rest of us...

Drupal, Symfony and friends

There are thousands of situations in which you do not want to reinvent the wheel. It is a well known principle in Software Engineering, but not always well applied/known into the Drupal world. Let’s say for example, that you have...

An Introduction to VirtualBox

What is my aim with this post? It is to give you a good introduction to Oracle’s VirtualBox so you know all about it and what it can do. This is not a tutorial on how to install it and...

Drupal 8 PSR-4 Form compatibility in Drupal 7

Up until Drupal 8 there has been little to encourage well organised code. It now has PSR-4 autoloading so your classes are automatically included. Even though Drupal 8 is just round the corner, a lot of us will still be...