My development life in 2019 grew from front-end back to full-stack, as we built, launched, and settled in with a Drupal 8 (now 9) site at work. I am still writing HTML, Sass, and Javascript, but also Twig and PHP, and I have a lot more reason to be in the terminal window than before – now it’s Drush, but during the build I did more command-line PostgreSQL than I could ever have imagined, catching all the edge cases for migrating content. In 2020 we’ve been able to add features and have made a big push to solve accessibility problems with our site, which has required me to solve for the finickiness of focus setting in different browsers, among many other things.
Drupal Views with relationships and custom Drush commands using the Entity API are my superpower, and I am pleased to be able to say yes to our content team’s requests for lists of all pages with given traits. I help coworkers pull data from Google Analytics – sometimes using the API, with Python or Google Sheets – and have spent quite a bit of time getting good data into GA. I’m one of those people who loves regular expressions. GA is also somehow the easiest area for me to find questions to answer on Stack Exchange, which I enjoy.
I also enjoy training coworkers in our systems and producing useful documentation, though nothing compares to hunkering down and writing code. I love to build things, especially things that are complex enough that their structure needs real thought. My aim with this blog is to share documentation and to show off things I build, which outside of work tend to be toys – little games, animations, and utilities.
I like the details and looking under the hood, knowing fully how things work, and covering all the various use cases. I care about workflow and process, about accessibility, about good communication, and about trying to do things the best way and not just some way that works. I love automating anything I can, and reducing technical debt, especially with the delete key.
Yet somehow I am still a cranky Luddite.
Links Here and Abroad
Since May 2016, I’ve been part of the King Arthur Baking Company web team, where I help maintain and build features for a Drupal 9 and custom ecommerce site. With assorted vendor integrations and tools piled on, I have the opportunity to be a domain expert and a technology generalist. I work with our marketing and creative teams to define our needs and wants, then with the rest of the development team and outside partners to make it happen. This includes some project management, especially writing up detailed work tickets and performing QA. I keep tabs on our Google Analytics setup and have been GAIQ certified off and on since March 2017. And along the way I’ve played with other fun toys like Jekyll, mkdocs, and WebdriverIO!
Previously I was a partner with Aquilino Arts: One-Size-Fits-One Design, where I created custom WordPress themes and standalone single-page websites, taught clients how to maintain them, and curated the Aquilino Arts’ Pinterest page. It is not an overstatement to say that it was through that role and the support of my business partner Maria that I became a web developer.
On this blog, rweber.net, I share my projects as well as code snippets, advice, resources, and potential gotchas. My philosophy is: understand it deeply and you can do anything with it. Blogging about topics is one way I deepen my understanding of them.
You’ll find most of my finished solo pieces at my GitHub account or in posts tagged Portfolio here.