New Relic Real user monitoring hooks for Drupal
If you are using New Relic for performance monitoring a Drupal project, you may have noticed a large discrepency between the browser throughput and app server througput. In the example that follows,...
View ArticleMy Takeaways on the Digital Project Management Summit in Philadelphia.
When I told people that I was going to the inaugural digital project management conference, I'm not sure they knew what that meant. Is it a bunch of Gantt Charts, Process Diagrams, and Risk Assessment...
View ArticleSound "Bytes" From The Digital PM Summit
The Digital PM Summit took place earlier this week in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Two great days of listening to speakers and mingling with attendees later, I came away extremely pleased with the...
View ArticleProfessional Skills from Raising a Newborn
This last month my wife and I had a new baby. Since this was my second child, I spent less time panicking and more time preparing for the bundle of joy. It was during this preparation that I realized...
View ArticleWhat I Learned Today: Drupal Behat Breakpoints
Today I learned that the Drupal Behat Extension provides an extremely useful step definition for debugging. Breakpoints! Then I break It allows you to stop at a certain point in the test scenario so...
View ArticleSwitching from Apple OSX apps to Google Apps in the Browser
I’ve been using the Apple OSX suite of productivity tools (Safari, iCal, Mail) for as long as I’ve been using Macs (PowerBook G4 in ‘03). I’ve dabbled with other applications like Thunderbird, Firefox,...
View ArticleMetal Toad Project Manager Profile: Adam Edgerton
As part of our project manager application process, we ask applicants to respond to a number of questions about themselves focused on their approach and philosophy when it comes to project management....
View ArticleToadCast 019 - An Interview With The Pug Master Himself, Tom Martin
Download In ToadCast 019, Metal Toad PM Matt Payton helps me interview Tom Martin who was recently promoted to Senior Development Strategist at Metal Toad. We discuss his background in animation and...
View ArticleWhat I Learned Today: Drupal Behat Scenario Cleanup
I've been doing a lot more Behat testing recently. As my tests have gotten more complex, I've discovered that it was only a matter of "luck" that my earlier tests were properly cleaning up after...
View ArticleSome reflections on working with new-to-the-company Junior Developers
It all started the other day with a git pull from the development branch of one of our projects. I took a sip of my coffee, hit refresh on my browser, looked out the window at the sun over Portland's...
View ArticleGoing Paper-less with Google Drive
As a technology company, we tend to go full-bore with any tools that can move us away from paper. When Google Drive (formerly Google Apps) made authoring, organizing and sharing digital documents...
View ArticleWhy More People Select WordPress than Drupal to Build Websites
First off, Drupal has had a great year and a great quarter. According to builtwith.com Drupal is second among all Content Management Systems at 13.75% of the top 10K websites and has added ~250K new...
View ArticleStage Gating to Avoid Project Failure
One of the newer processes we’ve implemented at Metal Toad is that of stage gating. I was going to title this post "Stage Gating for Project Success," but really it’s all about risk avoidance and...
View ArticleWhat I Learned Today: Drupal #attached Awesomeness
What is #attached Drupal 7 introduced render arrays, which was really an expansion of the existing Form API. One of the special elements of a render array is the #attached key. In a nutshell, it allows...
View ArticleThe Drupal Entityqueue Module
If you're familiar with the Nodequeue module and you wanted to create a queue of other entity types, like users or terms, then you would have to install another module, like User Queue or Term Queue....
View ArticleDrupal 7 Tutorial: Using Entityqueue
Now that Entityqueue has been released, I wanted to give a quick tutorial on how to use it. You can manage the queues from the /admin/structure/entityqueue page. Click "Add" to create a new queue. Once...
View ArticleAngular services and useable patterns
AngularJS is a relatively new javascript framework that is taking the web application development world by storm. It boasts some incredible architecture and supporting components that change the way...
View ArticleHow To: Create a form show/hide password system in AngularJS
Numerous times during working with AngularJS there have been these moments of, oh, wow... OH, now that's cool... wow... Usually followed up by a warm happy feeling because what I wanted to do was...
View ArticlePond Life - Pt.1
Assimilate and Elaborate! Wikipedia describes a junior as a "third year high school student". Urban Dictionary describes it the same way and raises it a status of "still have another year to take...
View ArticleDrupal 7: When to use Entityqueue vs Draggable Views
This post was inspired by a question our VP Tony asked me while I was working on Entityqueue, he asked, "how is it different from Draggable Views?" At first the answer isn't as obvious, they both allow...
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