I began writing this series of posts on April 1st, 2021 to celebrate DrupalFest, Drupal’s 20th year. When I started, I was not sure I would be able to write something every day. For one thing, April would not have been the best time for me considering my personal challenges. I didn’t even think of doing anything until the very last minute (I am used to that). Second, I didn’t know what I would write about for 30 days!

This DrupalFest series of posts is about to end and I thought that a fitting end would be to talk about the future of Drupal. I have already written a bit about this in my previous post: what I want to see in Drupal 10. However, this post is more aspirational and even dream-like. Some of these may sound really far-fetched and it may not even be clear how to get there. For the purposes of this post, that’s fine. I will not only worry about the how; just the what.

The configuration API is one of the major areas of progress made in Drupal 8. It addresses many challenges of managing a site across environments for Drupal 7 and before. It’s not perfect. After all, it’s just version 1 and there is work going on in CMI 2 to fix the problems in the current version. That is not the subject of this blog post, however. In this post, I want to talk about one of the lesser understood features of configuration management: overriding.

Just as I published yesterday’s article on the tech stack, I realized that I missed a few important things. I had said that the list was only a start, so I think it is fitting to continue it today. As such, today’s post won’t be as long as yesterday’s or even as long as my usual posts. I should also add a caveat that today’s post won’t make the list complete. With the industry how it is and the requirement of constantly learning, I don’t think such posts stand the test of time; not from a completeness perspective in any case.

The title of this post is not really accurate, but I can’t think of another way to say it. This post is related to my earlier one on what a Drupal Developer does day-to-day. Here, I will talk about some of the skills required of a Drupal developer. I am not aiming for completeness in this post (that’s a goal for another time) but I will try to list all skills required to build a regular Drupal site, deploy it, and keep it running. Some of these skills are foundational whereas others may be only needed for specific requirements. Moreover, not all skills are required at a high expertise level. For some roles, even awareness is enough.

Over the years, I have significantly lesser time for development and an increasing need to move around. After dealing with back-pain due to the weight of my Dell laptop while travelling for conferences, I bought a 15″ MacBook Pro. More recently, with the issues with Docker performance on Mac, I have been thinking of getting a Linux box. I was further motivated when I bought an iPad last year. Now, with my old MacBook Pro failing because of the keyboard and hard disk, I have a new MBP with the M1 chip and just 8 GB RAM. I am more and more interested in making remote development work efficiently for me.

I thought I was done with the series of posts on object-oriented programming after my last one. Of course, there is a lot we can write about object-oriented programming and Drupal, but that post covers everything noteworthy from the example. There is a way which is old-school but works as it should and another which looks modern but comes with problems. Is there a middle-ground? Tim Plunkett responded on Twitter saying there is.

I previously wrote about how the object-oriented style of programming can be seen as a solution to all programming problems. There is a saying: if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It is not a stretch to say that object-oriented programming is the hammer in this adage. That post was quite abstract and today I want to share a more specific example of what I mean. More specifically, I’ll talk about how using “objects” to alter forms without thinking it through can cause harm.