Preston So

These days more than ever, it's essential to have an experienced project manager on challenging projects, to manage remote teams with deep care, and to leverage best-of-class tools and best practices to shepherd the work of an agile development team.

Preston So

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.

Preston So

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 issue management will evolve thanks to cutting-edge functionality like merge requests and issue forks in GitLab.

Michael Meyers

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 the end-user experience. The “Admin UI & JavaScript...

Preston So

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 application can operate at scale under heavy load. Though other load testing ecosystems...

Gerhard Killesreiter

While Drupal's performance is always of interest, it has a hard time defending itself against the features people want to add. There are different ways to address this, but the "less features" approach is usually not defensible. To defend itself from the feature onslaught, Drupal tries to load as few lines of PHP code as possible, which helps to increase performance. A PHP opcode cache (such as APC) helps even more and points the way...

Jeremy Andrews

I began porting the dba module to Drupal 7 as an opportunity to learn more about the new database abstraction layer. In this upcoming Drupal release, our database layer is now built upon the PHP Data Objects (PDO) data-access abstraction layer, introducing new syntax and symantecs into writing queries with Drupal. A powerful new query builder makes it possible to easily write queries that run on any database type supported by Drupal, currently including MySQL...

Jeremy Andrews

I have completed a rough draft of the first chapter of " Drupal Performance and Scalability ". The first chapter of this online book is divided into four sections, the first of which focuses on the importance of fully defining your performance and scalability goals, helping you to identify what you need to accomplish and how to set concrete and attainable goals. The second section discusses monitoring and measuring your ongoing progress, helping you decide...

Jeremy Andrews

Tag1 Consulting is focused on improving Drupal's performance and scalability. We also believe that when information is freely shared, everyone wins. Toward these ends, we are working on an online book titled, " Drupal Performance and Scalability ". The book is divided into five main sections, Drupal Performance , Front End Performance , Improved Caching and Searching , Optimizing the Database Layer , and Drupal In The Cloud . The book is primarily aimed toward...

Jeremy Andrews

SearchBench has received a couple of useful updates since yesterday's initial cloud tests. It can generate search queries based on actual content, and it can export search benchmark results. In gaining these features, it is now possible to use SearchBench to perform some actual performance comparisons. Once again I set up these tests on an extra large EC2 instance. I still have not performed any tuning, and I continue to test Drupal 5 core search...