The Cloud
What does Metal Toad do?
Welcome to Metal Toad! So you’ve been hired at this cool tech company cal
TOPIC
PHP
The Cloud
How Cloud became the most important buzzword in business
Cloud is not the first (and probably not the last) disruptor to business via software. Over the past 50 years or so there have been four major epochs...
The Cloud
Building a AWS Headless CMS
Over the past several years, Metal Toad has launched several successful cloud-first web and mobile applications, often with hardware components. With...
The Cloud
Docker Containers & Clustering/Orchestration
The Big Picture The aim of this blog post isn’t to get into the nitty gritty how to build and run a containerized app on your favorite cloud provider...
Drupal
Drupal 8: Consumption of a Third-Party API
For a recent project, we were tasked to consume the client's internal data from a custom API. Now, this scenario was lucky for us, the API provides a...
Business
Programmatically Importing Drupal 8 Field Configurations
Sometimes during development, a chicken and egg situation happens when business logic intersects with Drupal's mechanisms. For instance, a custom...
Drupal
Drupal 8: Migrating data from JSON files
The beauty of Drupal 8's built-in Migrate module is its flexibility. Lots of people will likely use it to migrate their Drupal 6 or 7 sites, but...
Artificial Intelligence
Secrets to Project Happiness Using Git
I have worked with dozens of projects over my career, on platforms ranging from Drupal to Yii to Django to AngularJS
Artificial Intelligence
Search by Content Type in Drupal 8 - a custom module tutorial
At the time of this writing, the Search API module is still in alpha phase. A note from the module maintainers warn that it is unstable. This blog...
Drupal
Anatomy of a Drupalgeddon attack
Before working at Metal Toad, I saw an email from Acquia. A strange email. It went something like this:
Education
The Open Source Apprenticeship Model
The software industry is facing a workforce shortage of unprecedented proportions.
Database
WordPress Deployments: Example of Database Changes in Code
How do you update the database of a WordPress site that's already in production without a lengthy content freeze or losing your client's data?
Drupal
Drupal 7 Tutorial: Creating a Custom Entityqueue Handler
Entityqueue uses Ctools plugins for what we call an EntityQueueHandler. In this post we are going to see how to create a custom EntityQueueHandler.
AWS
Amazon CloudFront with Drupal 8
Since I wrote my first review of CloudFront, Amazon has added support for three essential features...
The Cloud
Full Stack Basics for the Non-Developer
Let's visualize and talk about the "full stack" of web development.
Drupal
Drupal 8 Migrations, part 4: Migrating Nodes from Drupal 7
Drupal 8 provides a flexible, plugin-based architecture for migrating data into a site. In Part 3 of this series, we explored how to migrate...
Drupal
Drupal 8 Migrations, part 3: Migrating Taxonomies from Drupal 7
Drupal 8 provides a flexible, plugin-based architecture for migrating data into a site. In Part 2 of this series, we explored how to migrate users...
Drupal
Drupal 8 Migrations, part 2: Migrating users from a Drupal 7 site
In this article, we will be building a custom migration which will import users from a Drupal 7 site into a Drupal 8 site. The migration will include...
Artificial Intelligence
Why Portland will be the Next Tech Hub
The demand for software continues to rise. I've written before on the current workforce gap and how that gap will be filled through vocational...
Artificial Intelligence
Drupal 8: First Impressions for the Back-End Developer
Drupal 8 is in beta now, and recently I’ve had a chance to start working with it. While much of the admin interface is comparable to Drupal 7, there...
Education
The Challenge to Innovation
Recently inspired by Peter Thiel's excellent book Zero to One, I've been reflecting on the software industry as the preeminent place where we can...
Agile
10 Months as a Junior Developer
I am now within a couple days of having survived as a Junior Developer at Metal Toad for 10 whole months.