The last couple days I attended Drupal Flyover Camp 2019 at UMKC in Kansas City, MO. I picked up on a few tricks and tools that I thought I’d mention here, just so I don’t forget some of the details.

Friday - Day 1

My favorite presentation of the day was Visual Regression Testing with BackstopJS by David Needham. There’s some cool tech here that I think could be very useful with things like Digital Grinnell, Rootstalk, and even this blog.

David Needham’s presentation also included some live command line work and I was also impressed with his terminal and environment. David used iTerm2 as a replacement for the standard Mac “Terminal” app, and combined that with Z shell or ‘zsh’ instead of ‘bash’. I have since started using both and am finding lots of nice features that I believe will help me in my work. I’ve adopted the bira theme for ‘zsh’ and am loving it. David also shared a gist with some nice ‘bash’ profile improvements.

From David’s presentation I was also encouraged to learn how to launch Atom from the command line. That simple change is documented here.

I also attended the session titled Bringing Sanity to Your Git Workflow and picked up on a couple of gems from presenter Josh Fabean.

The first of Josh’s gems was git add -p or --patch, an option that lets you interactively pick and choose only those modifications that you want added, or indexed, for a commit. The option gives the user ability to review differences in individual files before adding modified contents to the index.

The second gem is this visualizing-git online tool. Check it out.

Saturday - Day 2

Jeff Geerling’s presentation of Everything I Know About Kubernetes I Learned from a Cluster of Raspberry Pis was both informative and entertaining. Great stuff. I was especially pleased to see that Jeff still relies on Ansible as his “golden hammer”. I think I will revisit his book and get back in the habit of using Ansible. I also recommend keeping an eye on Jeff’s blog and projects list.

Tess Flynn, aka ‘socketwench’ conducted another high-energy presentation, this time it was Dr. Upal is In: Healthcheck Your Site!. From this presentation I’ll follow-up with a look at the details of the Site Audit Module, the Healthcheck Module, and Hacked!.

Last, but not least, was the Regression Resolved: Compare Months of Commits in Seconds with Git Bisect presentation by David Needham. Simply awesome.

And that’s a wrap. Until next time…