Has it really been almost three years since I last rapped at ya? I think the post title explains it best: I’ve been working at work on work, and so not much personal coding has occurred.

Drupal

Most recently, I’ve been embroiled in a major Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 overhaul at my current place of employership. A project that started over a year and a half ago is finally getting close to its completion. And just as Drupal 9 is working out its initial quirks! To be honest, Drupal 9 is just Drupal 8.8 with deprecated code removed, so it’s not the major step it seems like.

While I’d already helped move one of our sites into Drupal 8, that was from a custom framework, so this is the first time I’ve done a direct 7->8 upgrade. The whole process has been a bit stressful, and I’ll be glad to see it “done” (i.e. on a prod server for others to use so we can begin to get bug reports to fix).

Angular

Before we embarked on this D7->D8 thingy, our other major project was to overhaul an old custom web app by moving it into its new home as an Angular 7/Symfony 3/MongoDB stack. Angular is written in Typescript, which I’d never worked in before. It’s like JavaScript, but with types, which makes it quite interesting to mess around in.

One site I learned about at DrupalCon which is amazing at prototyping is StackBlitz. It has saved me many hours of trying to test things in our actual app by just giving me a bog-standard Angular app to play with, minus all the cruft on top.

For the Road

I tinker with my existing websites and webapps occasionally, but my heart’s not currently in it. I think I need some kind of sea change to occur before I get heavily into anything that isn’t mandated by my job. This is sad to me, but I don’t know how to change it right now.

Until next time!