January 2026

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.