If you look at our company chat channel lately, it looks like a triage unit. Between school-aged kids bringing home the plague and the start of the annual 'indoor germ-swapping season,' multiple team members have been posting out-of-office (OOO) alerts every morning.

It made me realize how fortunate I am. I checked my own history, and my mean time between failure (MTBF) regarding illness is about 1.5 to 2 years.

Drupal 11.3.0 is out, and like many of us who manage Drupal sites, I don't just wear one hat. Depending on the hour of the day, I might be writing a module, tweaking CSS, or SSH-ing into a server to figure out why the disk is full.

Here is what the 11.3.0 feature list means to me when I put on my three different hats.

1. As a Backend Developer

"Finally, my .theme file isn't a dumping ground anymore."

We all know the titans of the open-source world. You probably already have GIMP for image manipulation, Blender for 3D work, and VLC installed to play any media file in existence. But there is a layer of utilities beneath those giants that keep my daily workflow running smoothly.

Here are the lesser-known, mostly free, and incredibly powerful apps I install on every machine I touch.

I have this VHS video cassette, Creepy Classics, a humorously presented series of classic horror and sci-fi film trailers hosted by Vincent Price. It included a trivia card to test your knowledge of what was presented, so I've included a photo of it below. Enjoy! 🎃

In today's "always-on" work culture, there's a fine line between being responsive and being perpetually distracted. I'm in countless chats and channels, and I need to be aware of what's happening. But I also need to protect my focus. This led me to develop a system I call "digital omnipresence"—a way to be present everywhere without letting every message hijack my attention.

It's a method that allows me to be "in the loop" on everything, but only interrupted by the things that truly matter.

As a long-time Android user, I’ve been with the platform since the heady days of the G1. My spouse and I have been happy Google Fi subscribers for ages, largely thanks to its unbeatable international travel perks. For years, Google Assistant was the bedrock of our smart home, seamlessly weaving itself into our daily routines. We had our quirky, personalized commands: a simple "Open Joe's Bistro!" would bathe the kitchen and living room in a warm, inviting glow, while "It's movie night!" transformed the room into a cozy, indigo-lit cinema.

I've been wrestling with one of the most frustrating bugs I've encountered in a while on Windows 11. The scenario is simple: I'm in an application like VS Code or another editor, I go to File > Open, and the moment the File Explorer dialog appears, the entire application instantly crashes. 💥 No warning, no error message, and worst of all, absolutely nothing is recorded in the Event Viewer. It's as if the app just vanishes into thin air.

For a game development course I'm taking, I've started working on a concept that blends two of my passions: arcade racing and music creation. I'll open with the elevator pitch and then get into some of the details of my progress so far.

My game is tentatively titled Rhythm Racer, an arcade-style racing game where your performance as a player composes the soundtrack in real time.

I've been kicking around the fediverse for a while now. I jumped into Mastodon pretty early on, setting up shop across various instances—from the big public squares like mastodon.social and mas.to, to more focused communities like fosstodon.org for open-source fans and, of course, drupal.community. I even got my hands dirty and spun up my own instance, icom.lol, for the IronChefOfMusic project. 🎶