2016 review and what's next

I almost always set goals for the year. In 2016 I had a bunch of goals and I think it’s fair to say I achieved about 50% of them, which has me beaming! I came to the comforting conclusion about two years ago that I’m in a marathon and my prophetic powers being what they’re (non-existant), estimating time is tough but I sure as hell have an idea about my direction. With that out of the way, here’s how my 2016 turned out to be:

• I started working with the incredible folks at Onesheep.org. This is arguably the best bunch of people i’ve come across!
• I participated in the C4K Hackathon and our team came an impressive second. Yay

Getting rid of rdiff-backup's incremental backups

Recently I had to help with maintenance of a server that I didn’t configure myself that had maxed out its storage (the horror!). Anyway, it took me some time to figure out it was using the handy and useful rdiff-backup package to create and store backups automatically. Rdiff-backup’s mission is succinctly put as an idea is to combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup

As it turns out, rdiff-backup does come with a handy tool to configure it to delete backups that are x-days old e.g 4 weeks:

rdiff-backup --remove-older-than 4W target-dir

What I learnt pair programming with a senior dev

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure to travel for some pair programming with a senior developer in our team who lives in Cape Town. This being our first meeting, I was really excited to finally meet the guy we all joke is a bot (internal joke). During my time in Strand (quiet city in Cape Town), I learnt some things I’d like to share here. These things became more apparent after our sessions and I think they should be considered huge benefits of pairing with someone more senior.

Connecting Dots

In his famous Stanford commencement address, Steve Jobs said something about connecting the dots and how you can only do that after the fact. The first time I heard that, it didn’t shake my thinking; actually I dismissed it offhandedly without putting much thought into it. Not that I didn’t think it wasn’t true nor profound but like most things in life, hands-on experience is often more hard hitting than simple, verbal advice.

Better breadcrumbs for your Drupal 7 site

Often times when creating custom modules for Drupal, we get confronted with the problem of setting friendly but useful breadcrumbs. The contribution a clearly set breadcrumb can make on a page can never be understated, it guides the user on where they’re coming from and currently are.