Blog

Is blogging a form of teaching, sharing, learning, or something else? Perhaps more importantly, is blogging helpful? A blog can be a place to write with no expectation that anyone will read. Some blogs improve the world. Others approximate something else altogether.

In a Dhamma talk yesterday, Ajahn Amaro mentioned the Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran, who wrote about parenting in his 1923 book, The Prophet. Gibran's words seem to uncomplicate the complicated. He claims that we parents need to do little more than offer children our love, and that we can't control them. They are not ours to control. Should we believe him?

Yesterday, I spent much of the day working on a deck project in my backyard. Activities such as housework and home improvement projects offer good opportunities to watch the mind. On meditation retreats, these activities get labels such as "working meditation" or "yogi jobs." The common wisdom seems to hold that we should perform these activities in silence, paying full attention to the task at hand. Over the past few years, I have been investigating the validity of this claim.

Yogis around the world regard Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras as a foundational text. Patañjali offers helpful advice on a wide variety of topics, but this article will focus on just one: loving-kindness.

As the global pandemic continues to spread — causing widespread sickness and death, restricting in-person human contact, creating additional responsibilities at home or financial hardships, or any of the countless other changes to daily life that have resulted in feelings such as fear, anger, boredom, or uncertainty — this virus has forced some of us to reassess our values and our place in the world. While the majority of us who participate in the Drupal community remain focused squarely on technical issues, others might find now is an especially good time to take a closer look at Drupal's Values and Principles.

As each of us negotiates a world where COVID-19 dominates the headlines and our everyday interactions, this article considers how some of the lessons that the Drupal community—perhaps an idealized Drupal community—has learned might shape our understanding of these times that feel so extraordinary. Drupal does not have a monopoly on any of these concepts, but in stressful times, similes and metaphors can help us interrogate our underlying assumptions and the communities that we have each constructed.

In this article, I use data from the Drupal Git commit history, as well as other sources, to demonstrate how dramatically the Drupal core “code committing” landscape has changed. My analysis below argues that the process of committing code to Drupal core is a far more complex process than some might assume of a project with a BDFL.

For the professional web developer/engineer who gets paid to write code and build websites, writing R code for data science should feel somewhat familiar. Web development and data science can both involve writing code. However, some of the fundamental concepts are quite distinct, such as data structures. For instance, at multiple points in my life, after months of writing code almost exclusively for web development, I will suddenly get the idea that I want to analyze some data.

When I attended my first DrupalCon in San Francisco I brought three suits. At that point, I had been speaking at (academic) conferences for a decade, and in my experience conferences were places where attendees dressed formally and speakers literally read their papers (here's a real example from a 2005 Women's and Gender Studies Conference where I spoke). I arrived in San Francisco thinking I would spend some time exploring the city while I was there, but I ended up spending nearly all of my extra time in the ChX Coder Lounge learning everything I could about Drupal from kind people in the Drupal community.

Article by Timothy McKenry, Australian Catholic University