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.

Note: I selected this image before these torches took on a much different meaning. I am leaving this image in place because we truly cannot know where the future will lead from where we are in a moment. All we can do is do our best to keep working towards a brighter future. I still stand by the message in this post and believe in its message today, almost exactly five years later, on the evening of January 16, 2022.

In the darkness of 2016, the brightest light for me and many others has been Lin-Manuel Miranda's broadway hit, Hamilton. A multitude of musical styes mix with a compelling look at our nation's founding through the eyes of immigrant extraordinaire Alexander Hamilton. A diverse cast infuses a familiar story with a new look that shows how all of the threads of America's great tapestry are welcomed and valued and how yes, immigrants get the job done.

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.

One of the goals I am working on is learning how to write tests for Drupal. I have been collecting resources on how to do so, and I thought others might find these resources useful too.

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.)