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John Brandenburg

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    • Close Polling Stations:
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By John, 10 June, 2020

Blackout page

If you attempted to visit this site in the week before this was posted, you would have seen an entirely blacked out page. This was to observe in Blackout Tuesday, which was an effort to provide a platform for black content creators to say their voice. 

The blackout page can still be seen here.

By John, 29 February, 2020

Gamification for open source software

Here's an idea, let's gamify open source software contributions. Here's a list, it's still in development:

File an issue on a project: 10 pts.

Create a patch file and post it to that issue: 50 pts.

Have that patch file committed to the project: 100 pts.

Become a maintainer for a project: 1000 pts

Incorporate a contributed patch for a project you maintain: 200 pts.

Write a unit test for a project (either one you maintain or not) 300 pts

Make your first core contribution to:

By John, 16 January, 2020

Site Performance and Misbehaving Bots

Site performance at the enterprise level requires addressing some technical debt in an organization, as well as combating bots that don't want to follow the rules.
By John, 7 November, 2019

Becoming the maintainer of a Drupal module

Becoming the maintainer of a Drupal module is not as hard as it seems, and there is a pressing need for more developers to take over this role in the Drupal community as a whole.
By John, 28 October, 2019

Enabling the php72-fpm Service

The other day, my hosting provider initiated a forced reboot of the server I use to run this website. Unfortunately, this resulted in some unanticipated down time. Now I should note, I’m a web application developer, not a system administrator. I really run this server has a hobby an as an opportunity to learn. But in my professional career, I delegate the responsibilities of setting up these things to a team of talented system administrators. With the site down, I was seeing entries like this in my logs:

By John, 15 August, 2019

State of Wisconsin de-registers 68,120 voters

State of Wisconsin de-registers 68,120 voters after 4 year maintenance deadlinee passes
By John, 12 August, 2019

Net Neutralty, ISPs and the rest of the web infrastructure

Do services like Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) fall under the perview of net neutrality?
By John, 22 March, 2019

Debugging in Drupal 8 Vs. Drupal 7: Quick reference

I keep digging up this same information from some obscure sources, so I thought I would post it here. Now if you have not set up XDebug with a project locally, I highly recommend that, but still, nothing beats a good stack trace. In Drupal 7, I would drop this into settings.php to show errors, regardless of the site settings:

Tags

  • Tech
  • Drupal 7
  • Drupal 8
By John, 18 March, 2019
A plate containing a dozen cupcakes. The cupcakes are covered in fun-fetti icing, and decorated with candy eyeballs and moustaches to look like faces. Each cake's eyes and faces look sightly different, giving each one a unique expression, while appearing to look in different directions.

The proper way to install node on Linux, with nvm

Little things can take a long time. If you are like me, and use Linux (Ubuntu) for your work machine, you might inevitably run into a permissions issue with the default way npm/node is installed. There is a better way, and that's with nvm.

Tags

  • Tech
  • NodeJS
By John, 11 March, 2019

Firefox fails silently on ajax requests

I am in the middle of preparing to launch a site on my company's hosting platform. This site in particular consumes a service, provided by a server running on NodeJS. We typically secure dev sites behind some basic authentication by the web server, which is mainly done to prevent dev sites from being indexed by search crawlers. So to get past this basic authentication, I set the dev URL to follow the username:password@domain convention. I have not used this often, only for simple cases over the years.

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