Blogs

Preston So

April 29, 2020

Embracing open source:

How open source can transform your career - part 1

Open source as a concept has been on the radar of the software community for many years now, but in many ways it is only just starting to gain steam among the enterprise organizations and business leaders that are seeking new ways to ensure the longevity of the solutions and architectures they build. At its core, open source is about more than just software; it’s about the community that surrounds it. Leveraging and contributing back...

Preston So

April 27, 2020

Components everywhere: How JSX can inspire Twig components for Drupal's front end - part 3

Drupal is quickly approaching a critical inflection point in terms of its ability to adapt to and outperform other technologies in the web development space, particularly in the front end. Trends like decoupled Drupal, are rapidly gaining adoption in the Drupal community, but such architectural approaches do not resolve the issue of how Drupal's front end can contend with the increasing focus on popular front-end technologies like React and Vue.

Preston So

April 22, 2020

Tag1 TeamTalk #013

eLearning with Kids at Home featuring HTML5 Speech-to-Text: Tag1 TeamTalk #013

With people around the world working from home and caring for their families in these challenging times, many of us are struggling with the difficulty of juggling work and having to homeschool our children. This can be even more challenging when your kids are very young and require more supervision and attention. As technologists we always think, “is there some way I can solve my problem with code and automation”

Preston So

April 19, 2020

Components everywhere: How a virtual DOM could bring Drupal to a reactive front-end future - part 2

A debate has been ongoing for several years about how Drupal's front end can compete against the primacy of JavaScript frameworks that are rapidly gaining steam in the wider web development community. In this multi-part blog series, we review the most important concepts behind this potential future for Drupal's front end, including Web Components, virtual DOMs, and what Drupal can learn from other ecosystems. In this second installment in the series, we examine how Drupal's...

Preston So

April 15, 2020

Components everywhere: Is Drupal’s front-end future in Web Components? - part 1

The question of where Drupal's front end is headed has led to much handwringing in the community, with a variety of ongoing discussions about whether decoupled Drupal is the future for Drupal's presentation layer. Out of all the debates in the community, few have engendered as much consternation and spilled ink as how, when, and whether to replace or augment Twig's functionality as the default theme engine for Drupal.

Preston So

April 13, 2020

Laravel at enterprise scale: Resolving back-end and front-end challenges for an organization serving millions of users - part 2

One of the most formidable challenges of implementing any large-scale enterprise website is the choice of a framework that will ensure both high performance and long-term maintainability. Tag1 recently chose Laravel to serve the needs of a customer that is a national organization providing for millions of users and hundreds of affiliate chapters across the United States. Laravel was selected not only because of its favorable developer experience and ability to simplify business logic but...

Preston So

April 08, 2020

Decentralized collaboration with Yjs and WebRTC: Potential applications for y-webrtc and how to get involved - part 5

What does the future of peer-to-peer real-time collaboration look like? Thanks to the spread of emerging web technologies like WebRTC, a protocol for communication between browsers on discrete systems, Yjs, an open-source real-time collaboration framework, and y-webrtc, the Yjs connector for WebRTC, a new range of use cases is entering the picture. While there are limitations, such as certain ceilings on the number of simultaneous collaborators, developments like y-webrtc are sure to reshape the landscape...

Hunter Lannon

April 06, 2020

Automating certificate management with ACME & Ansible (Automated Certificate Management Environment)

One of the annoying things about web hosting is managing certificates - nobody wants to spend time creating Certificate Signing Requests and checking emails for expiry notices. They expire, and domains change and become invalid, leaving a system administrator to communicate with a Certificate Authority (CA) to get new certificates and install them on the servers that need them. This manual process is tiring, boring, and has the potential to bring downtime to your services.

Preston So

April 01, 2020

Laravel at enterprise scale: Tackling complex business logic for millions of users with Laravel - part 1

In the PHP landscape, perhaps no framework has made as daring of decisions and as innovative of choices as Laravel, the PHP ecosystem that has long not been afforded the spotlight offered readily to CMS ecosystems like Drupal and WordPress and the lower-level Symfony. Laravel has displayed some unconventional directions, including adopting Vue.js as its JavaScript framework of choice and eschewing some of the common features available in other web frameworks. Fortunately, with the rich...

Preston So

March 30, 2020

Decentralized collaboration with Yjs and WebRTC: Handling many connections and applications for Yjs - part 4

Real-time collaboration is now more reality than ambition, but several obstacles remain, particularly in the form of peer-to-peer collaboration when many collaborators are involved. While Yjs, an open-source framework for real-time collaboration, and WebRTC, a new protocol for peer-to-peer communication now seeing wide browser support, permit editorial collaboration between peers in a graceful way, things get more complicated when many users enter the picture. Nonetheless, thanks to y-webrtc, the Yjs integration with WebRTC, we can...