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.

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:

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:

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:

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.