Whether I'm making new friends and industry relationships, or even just participating in casual conversation, I often get asked how someone with my educational background ended up in the technology sector. The simple answer is equal parts passion and procrastination with a sprinkling of subversion and a pinch of counter-culture.…
I learned about GitHub Actions when it was released last year, although didn't investigate further as I'd already configured my hobby project CI/CD pipelines using Travis CI to a satisfactory standard. While everything generally worked really well, I found myself running up against some obscure issue with Travis that…
I remember learning about the difference between sympathy and empathy in middle school. Sympathy: feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune. Empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.Pretty damn simple to understand the difference when you read each of the above definitions, but…
As I have moved my blog platform over to Ghost, I've realised that there will be other parts of my technical ecosystem that will keep me busy tinkering. One such part of that is how to cache every page on this site (effectively) permanently whilst also allowing new posts and…
I find it's highly beneficial to do a personal reset every so often. While I can't speak for others, for me personal resets come in a number of different forms although usually over the course of at least a weekend. They take me out of my comfort zone and allow…
It's been quite literally years that I've been putting off updating my blog, both in the underlying technology as well as the content that resides within. While August is probably eight months too late to invoke the new year in a blog title, it's a theme that I can work…
I've recently been working with a client using Drupal, Varnish, and Cloudflare as part of their digital transformation journey. The client had requirements to ensure that requests coming in through Cloudflare, which should be all requests, would include a check to ensure only their internal IP ranges and ours would…
Over the last couple of days an internal thread has been making the rounds at Acquia about speeding up Composer for Drupal builds. With Drupal 8, Lightning and the BLT project making heavy use of Composer to manage its dependencies, users frequently rebuilding from source, or those in remote regions…
