Tag1 Team Talks | The Tag1 Consulting Podcast

PART 1 - WHAT IS IT, WHY USE IT, HOW DOES IT WORK? Documentation is a critical part of any customer-facing product or service. Without it, your customers need hand holding, your support staff struggles to help your users, and your company spends money on unhappy customers instead of creating new products.  One of the biggest challenges is creating quality documentation. Treating your document...

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to render most workforces remote for the foreseeable future, crafting inclusive, high-functioning distributed teams isn't an easy matter. At Tag1, we've worked as a remote-first team since the beginning, thanks to deft project management like Janie Ledet's. These days more than ever, it's essential to have an experienced project manager on challenging projects...

In the last of our 4 part series, Michael Meyers (Managing Director, Tag1 Consulting) and your host Preston So (Editor in Chief, Tag1 Consulting) had an opportunity to join Janie Ledet (Project Manager & Scrum Master, Tag1 Consulting) for miniseries about the human side of managing projects in agile software. We'll dive into the most important considerations when resourcing and conducting disc...

PART 1 - GETTING TO KNOW JANIE Among other things, the ongoing pandemic has ripped open the former fabric of our work lives, decentralizing and distributing our collaboration in newfound ways. Project management for agile software development teams is a mission that serves the dual purpose of efficiently producing good software and empowering the humans behind any product. As Project Manager and S...

 PART 2 - HAVING AN EXPERIENCED PM ON A PROJECT IS WORTH THE COST  Among other things, the ongoing pandemic has ripped open the former fabric of our work lives, decentralizing and distributing our collaboration in newfound ways. Project management for agile software development teams is a mission that serves the dual purpose of efficiently producing good software and empowering the humans be...

Throughout Drupal's history, contributors have rallied around Drupal.org as the single source of truth for both the code running Drupal and the infrastructure powering Drupal's issue queues, source control, and automated testing. As the Drupal Association continues on its journey to integrate GitLab features with Drupal.org, we're beginning to see the first glimpses of how Drupal contribution and...

Last month at DrupalCon Global, Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, announced that a major focus of Drupal 9 will be improving the user interface and user experience of the platform - for all personas. Two of the five D9 Strategic Initiatives have been dedicated to making this happen. The “New Front-End Theme Initiative” or user interface (UI) for Drupal, also known as the Olivero Theme, covers...

Too often, organizations believe that contracting more affordable and less expensive resources for a project will lead to better savings. Here at Tag1 Consulting, we've in fact discovered that the opposite is true: Hiring cheaper often leads to worse results. Though it's often convenient to look at the hourly rate, or the provided quote for the project, this can often lead to less attention on que...

Many front-end technologies, especially React, now consider the notion of declarative components to be table stakes. Why haven't they arrived in environments like the Drupal CMS's own front end? Many native CMS presentation layers tend to obsolesce quickly and present a scattered or suboptimal developer experience, particularly against the backdrop of today's rapidly evolving front-end development...

After four-and-a-half years of development, Drupal 9 was just released, a milestone in the evolution of the Drupal content management system. The Drupal Association has long played a critical role not only in supporting the advancement and releases of one of the world's largest and most active open-source software projects; it also contributes to the Drupal roadmap and drives its forward momentum...

Maintaining Drupal projects and managing Drupal modules can be challenging for even contributors who have unlimited time. For decades now, Drupal's ecosystem has cultivated a wide array of tools for contributors to create patches, report issues, collaborate on code, and perform continuous integration. But as many source control providers begin to release shiny new features like web IDEs and issue...

Research shows that if your application introduces latency of even a few milliseconds, your business revenue can suffer immensely. At Tag1, we often have clients approach us with concerns about high traffic. Load testing and performance tuning often elicit groans from architects and developers more interested in building features, but it is a critical step in the process to ensuring your web appli...

Though the biggest news this month is the release of Drupal 9, that doesn't mean big releases aren't happening on other versions of Drupal too. The milestone represented by Drupal 9 also welcomes new versions of both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 to the Drupal ecosystem. It's been four-and-a-half years since Drupal 8 was released, and 54 months of development from scores of contributors around the world w...

ReasonML is a functional programming language that has built-in React support, JavaScript-like syntax, and a highly efficient toolchain optimized for code management and compilation. With seamless interoperability with existing JavaScript and originally written by Facebook, ReasonML is quickly becoming a language of choice not only for functional programming enthusiasts well-versed in OCaml but al...

What is the day-to-day life of a Drupal core committer like? Besides squashing bugs and shepherding the Drupal project, the maintainers responsible for Drupal core are also constantly thinking of ways to improve the developer experience and upgrade process for novice and veteran Drupal users alike. With Drupal 9 coming just around the corner, and with no extended support planned for Drupal 8 thank...

Drupal is one of the largest and most active open-source projects in the world, and the Drupal Association is responsible for enabling it to thrive by creating and maintaining tooling and other projects that keep Drupal humming. Though many in the Drupal community and outside it see the Drupal Association only as the organizer of the global DrupalCon conferences each year, the Drupal Association i...

With people around the world working from home and caring for their families in these challenging times, many of us are struggling with the difficulty of juggling work and having to homeschool our children. This can be even more challenging when your kids are very young and require more supervision and attention. As technologists we always think, “is there some way I can solve my problem with code...

Laravel is a PHP framework that has witnessed comparatively less attention than CMS heavyweights like Drupal and WordPress and frameworks like Symfony, but it nonetheless offers several compelling advantages for enterprise website implementations. Recently, a large organization worked with Tag1 to move legacy databases into a more modern approach that, coupled with Laravel and Vue.js, led to consi...

Content collaboration has long been table stakes for content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, but what about real-time peer-to-peer collaboration between editors who need direct interaction to work on their content? The WordPress Gutenberg team has been working with Tag1 Consulting and the community of Yjs, an open-source real-time collaboration framework, to enable collaborative edit...

An effective administrative interface is table stakes for any content management system that wishes to make a mark with users. Claro is a new administration theme now available in Drupal 8 core thanks to the Admin UI Modernization initiative. Intended to serve as a logical next step for Drupal's administration interface and the Seven theme, Claro was developed with a keen eye for modern design pat...

What happens when you have a connection that isn't working, but you have a mission-critical document that you need to collaborate on with others around the world? The problem of peer-to-peer collaboration in an offline environment is becoming an increasingly pressing issue for editorial organizations and enterprises. As we continue to work on documents together on flights, trains, and buses, offli...

WebRTC, a protocol that facilitates peer-to-peer communication between two clients via the browser, is now supported by all modern browsers. Since its introduction it has mainly been used for web conferencing solutions, but WebRTC is ideal for a variety of other use cases as well. Because of its wide platform support, creating peer-to-peer applications for the web is now more straightforward than...

With the release of Drupal 8.8, Drush is also due for an upgrade — to Drush 10. For this venerable command-line interface that many Drupal developers know intimately well, what does the present and future look like? What considerations should we keep in mind when selecting Drupal Console or Drush? What new features are available in Drush 10 that characterize the new CI/CD approaches we see expandi...

Yjs, one of the most powerful and robust frameworks for real-time collaborative editing, enables developers to add shared editing capabilities to any application with relatively little effort. In order to make it so easy to use and extend Yjs, the framework abstracts all the complexities, many moving pieces, and deep technical concepts involved in empowering offline first, peer to peer, real time...

Automatic updates are coming to Drupal at the end of October! Long one of the most commonly requested features in the Drupal community, Drupal 7 and D8 will soon have an automatic updater that will allow Drupal installations to stay up-to-date more easily. How does Drupal's new auto updater work, and what do you need to know about it? In this Tag1 Team Talk, we dive into not only Drupal's new auto...