Blog

The worldwide live coding community is a diverse group of people that includes programmers, academics, musicians, dancers, visual artists, and others who like to get together in person to share sounds, visuals, and ideas. Compared to some parts of the world where live coding events happen regularly, the Midwest does not have a lot of opportunities to experience live coding live. However, this week we have two live coding events within relatively close proximity.

I first attempted to install TidalCycles about six months ago, in May 2018. I've learned a lot in the past six months, and I'd like to share some of the knowledge I've acquired. If you are new to Tidal or you've tried it out in the past and got stuck, then this unnumbered list of observations is for you.

On Friday (June 8) I attended my first live coding event, announced as "Nada presents Spednar, Rew, and Local Artists." This concert felt unlike any music concert I had ever attended. I greatly enjoyed the event and I've been investigating why. What follows recounts my experiences at one live coding event, and does not attempt to characterize all live coding events.

I needed to install Ubuntu 18.04 recently and I ran into some problems with OpenVPN 2.4.4 not working (it had worked fine with OpenVPN 2.4.0 from Debian stretch/stable). The errors pointed to ns-cert-type being the problem, which is indeed a deprecated option. But that led me to find suggestions to instead use remote-cert-tls server that did not help me get things working.

TidalCycles (or just "Tidal") is a programming language used for live coding. I'll leave further details about Tidal for another post, but essentially Tidal facilitates creating music with code. While the Tidal community hopes to make installing Tidal on GNU/Linux easier, I struggled to get Tidal working on Debian stable.

The Drupal community can bring people together, discourage hate, and promote democracy. I hope that we can find common ground, build on what we have accomplished, and organize against the forces that seek to divide us against ourselves.

Dries Buytaert and I examined commit data to help understand who develops Drupal, how much of that work is sponsored, and where that sponsorship comes from. We illustrate that the Drupal community is far ahead in understanding how to sustain and scale the project, and show that the Drupal project is a healthy project with a diverse community of contributors. Nevertheless, in Drupal's spirit of always striving to do better, we also highlight areas where the Drupal community can and should do better.

Recently the Drupal Association announced accepted sessions for DrupalCon New Orleans. While it looks like we can expect another great DrupalCon (this will be my 7th straight North American DrupalCon), one particular session on the program about the sale of Drupal modules caught my attention. Although I have tried to stay focused on preparing my own sessions, I have had conversations with other people in the Drupal community about “paid modules” that have led me to the conclusion that confusion about this topic persists. So here I would like to offer a perspective on why these kinds of plans consistently fail. Specifically, I hope to expand the scope of this frequently discussed issue and suggest why so many paid module initiatives fail: the Drupal community protects its free software with the same vigor that other communities protect artistic freedom.

Today we are proud to announce a new Drupal 8 module that provides support for the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project. The AMP Project is a new open source initiative which drastically improves the performance of the mobile web. In January 2016 Lullabot and Google started working together to create the Drupal AMP module. A beta version of AMP module for Drupal 8 is available immediately, and we are starting work on a Drupal 7 version of the module that will be available in mid-March.

While the new configuration system in Drupal 8 strives to make the process of exporting and importing site configuration feel almost effortless, immensely complex logic facilitates this process. Over the past five years, the entire configuration system code was written and rewritten multiple times, and we think we got much of it right in its present form. As a result of this work, it is now possible to store configuration data in a consistent manner and to manage changes to configuration.