I recently started renting a VPS server to host some of the ethical alternatives to the typical host of surveillance services.

One service that I have enjoyed in the past is Dropbox Paper. However this “free” (as in beer, not in freedom) service preys on your personal data, just like its big brother Dropbox. To me this is not acceptable, so I decided to give CodiMD a try. CodiMD is an evolution of HackMD, a free software alternative inspired in its free software cousin Etherpad. CodiMD is licensed under Affero General Public License¹.

DrupalCon North America is the anual conference about the Open Source CMS, and it is amazing. However this year there is something we need to help fix. It seems that in an effort to streamline the event’s organization the use of Google Slides is required to participate in the ignite talks.

My goal with this post is to encourage people to participate in this discussion so we can see other points of view.

Yesterday I decided to add some analytics to my blog. This was not something that I decided lightly since web site analytics are a type of tracking. For the longest time I considered analytics to be against the rights of privacy that this blog wants to defend.

If you are interested in the online privacy space and software development, then you should check out this track in FOSDEM 2020.

This last week I have been in Palm Springs attending the retreat of the company I work for, Lullabot. One of the evening activities are ignite talks. I presented one about privacy.

This is a re-post of the article I wrote for the Lullabot blog.

How can more maintainable custom code in Drupal be written? Refactor it to follow SOLID software design principles. As long SOLID purity isn’t pursued into an endless rabbit hole, SOLID principles can improve project maintainability. When a project has low complexity, it is worthwhile to respect these principles because they’re simple to implement. When a project is complex, it is worthwhile to respect these principles to make the project more maintainable.

Today I was included in a conversation in Drupal Slack that reminded me how important it is to take the time to learn one tool well.

In this case the issue was solved by creating a custom data type. This is the conversation log.

This is a re-post of https://wimleers.com/blog/jsonapi-1-eol.

On 7 January, 2020, the Drupal module JSON:API 1.x was officially marked unsupported. This date was chosen because it is exactly 1 year after the release of JSON:API 2.0, the version of JSON:API that was eventually committed to core. Since then, the JSON:API maintainers have been urging users to upgrade to the 2.x branch and then to switch to the Drupal core version.

We understand that there are still users remaining on the 1.x branch. We will maintain security coverage of the 8.x-1.x branch for 90 days. That is, on 6 April, 2020, all support for JSON:API, not in Drupal core, will end. Please upgrade your sites accordingly.

One the privacy higene topic, one cool trick that I learned is that I can configure Gnome to auto connect to a VPN when a certain wifi network is used.

Mercè’s smart phone screen broke recently. Luckily I was able to get a screen replacement for her old OnePlus 3T. Putting everything back was a challenge in itself, but thanks to this YouTube I was able to succeed.