We are a colorful bunch here at X-Team, and, this time, we are happy to talk to Maciej Chmurski, our resident expert on all things car drifting and drone racing. Who has not dreamed about driving like they do in movies? Well, Maciej can actually do that, though he only does it legally and in a controlled environment for everyone's safety, of course. Still, consider anything and everything you learn about drifting and drones today potentially dan [...]
Have you heard of the "new kid" in Back-End town? Well, he has been around for a while now, coming up on 8 years, but many people paid him no attention, as they were busy with their own PHP, Python, Java, etc. But now, he is shining brighter than ever. He blossomed into a jack-of-all-trades, and a definite master of more-than-just-one; and his name is Node.js. About Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment for serv [...]
DrupalConsole is a great CLI tool for Drupal 8. As we have seen in our Introduction to DrupalConsole, it is designed for generating boilerplate code and interacting with a Drupal site. The DrupalConsole Launcher executes console commands from the terminal. A console command should be as light as possible and not attempt to do too much. This article assumes you have installed the DrupalConsole Launcher and Drupal 8. Preferably, you should have rea [...]
In Part 1 of this series, we looked at how to make the right choice of skill for the basis of up-skilling, we looked at starting an Elm project, and how essential items, like routing and theming, were thought about and addressed, before starting any coding for the project itself. In this final part, we will look at the open source contribution opportunities that came up during the project, how unknowns were discussed with the Elm community, and h [...]
DrupalConsole is a command line interface (CLI) tool for the generation of boilerplate code, speeding up of administration tasks, and interaction with a Drupal 8 site. A similar tool, Drupal Shell (Drush), grew out of the need for managing Drupal sites from the terminal, which reduces the time it takes to perform numerous administrative tasks, without many clicks and page refreshes in the browser. With the decision to build Drupal 8 on existing [...]
Many applications require keeping track of when database records are created and updated. In PostgreSQL, we can track creation date by adding a created_at column with a default value of NOW(). However, for tracking updates, we will need to make use of triggers. Triggers allow us to define functions to be executed whenever a certain type of operation is performed. In this case, we will need to make sure that before any UPDATE operation, PostgreSQL [...]
You say to-may-to, we say to-mah-to. But recently, X-Teamers had the opportunity to pick the brain of a guy, who dedicated quite some time these last few years to study of productivity... and he does not say either of those. He says, pomodoro! We are talking, of course, about Karol Sojko. A developer, Unleasher, and a master of productivity, who also recently held a talk at the 4Developers 2017 conference, titled Unleashing Your Super-dev-powers [...]
Who does not like to meet old friends, make new friends and listen to some good talks for good measure? These three elements are at the core of the conference experience — increasing one's skill, mingling with like-minded people, and Node.js conferences tick all the boxes. There are international events happening on all continents, with thousands upon thousands of participants. And since a major front-end conference — React Europe &md [...]
It has been 10 months now, since I joined X-Team. Ten months of extraordinary experiences, of new friendships, and of interesting work. Now, I am here to tell you about some of the things X-Team does, which keep its people happy, and, more importantly, sane, while so many others are battling burnout on a daily basis. This blog has grown on the basis of a talk I recently gave at WebCamp Ljubljana. The content is similar but not identical, so if y [...]
There's never been a greater time to create an open source project. As I wrote about recently in Hackernoon, platforms like OpenCollective are giving open source projects the opportunity for sustainability like never before thanks to crowdfunding. But it's not just the hundreds of thousands of dollars in new funding that's changing the future of open source. In that post, I reference "The Larkin Effect" (Sean Larkin of Webpack), this idea that [...]