I haven't written here in a while, and I'm not going to make grand proclamations declaring that I'll be writing here regularly from now on. However, I did want to share a few notes on a few things going on in my life. Maybe I'll share updates on that going down the road: we'll see.

I started to realize about a year ago that I was experiencing burnout from the code contribution work I had been doing with Drupal. I hit a wall soon after DrupalCon New Orleans, where I had probably pushed myself too hard.

Over the last six months, the Drupal front-end community has had a lot of discussion about how to best use our theme system to work with design components. What would it mean to have a component-based theme system, and why does that matter?

With Drupal 8, we have several major improvements to our theme system.

Before you ask, yes, the image at the beginning of this post is a conductor, not a composer. The open source PHP package management Composer has a conductor as its official logo, and who am I to argue? An image of somebody scribbling away on sheet music may have been less compelling. A harmless sleight of hand.

As I work on more and more Drupal 8 sites, I am becoming convinced that given enough time, nearly all Drupal 8 sites will need to be managed with Composer. I think that's kind of a big deal.

What do you think about Drupal’s theme system? What’s your preferred way to change the appearance of a Drupal site? As with many things, that depends.

Your background and skills are going to have a big impact on what you need out of a system that helps change the way a Drupal site looks. What works well for me might not work well for you.

Drupal 8 offers big improvements to the front-end development experience. Twig improves working with markup; requiring libraries to declare dependencies allows us to deliver only necessary CSS and JS; and there are now two flavors of markup in core, provided by Classy and Stable. Yet we can still do more to improve front-end development with Drupal. At MidCamp in Chicago, a number of people who work with Drupal discussed some big potential improvements we could work towards, including:

Drew power walked down the gravel path, fists pumping back and forth. A cloud of birds burst from a nearby bush, scattering in all directions. Eyes widening, Drew skidded to a halt. Stiff arms pressed down, dug into hips. Short, tattered breaths settled into a long sigh and a groan.

“You spooked them.”

Drew glanced to the side. There sat a world-weary figure, perched on a bench, eyes glinting with mirth. “Didn’t mean to spook them, just trying to get where I need to go.”

Tonight I watched the Big Short for the second time. I highly recommend it to anyone. It does a remarkable job explaining some pretty complex financial topics in a way that is clear and understandable. If you want to understand why the economy collapsed in 2008, watch this movie.

The director typically does comedies, and that worked out really well, because it's a very enjoyable movie. Great acting, great dialogue. I've read the book twice, and the movie is very true to it. (The book's well worth a read too.)

As of January 12, 2016, Microsoft no longer supports Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10. From here on out, they will only provide security fixes for IE 11 and Edge.

For many front-end developers, this was a cause for celebration: we no longer need to provide fallbacks for browser features not supported in old IE! Being able to use Flexbox without float fallbacks comes to mind, as does not needing to worry about media query support in IE 8.

Tonight my kiddo and I saw The Force Awakens together.

My kiddo is a grand total of three-and-a-quarter years old. She and I have been playing with lightsabers and Star Wars toys and reading Star Wars books together since she was very young. I played the Han and Leia theme in her first moments (along with singing her You Are My Sunshine, both of which she had heard even before she was born). Around her third birthday, she asked to see a Star Wars movie, and she quickly became a huge fan of Leia. She wanted to be Leia for Halloween, and so she was.

The title of this post is a l33t-speak way to announce that Drupal has now been updated with a new major release, Drupal 8. This has been years in the making, and I'm thrilled! On a much smaller note, this site is now built on Drupal 8 as well.