On Friday, October 26th, I presented at DrupalCamp Ottawa 2018. That's the annual gathering of the Drupal community in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Session information:
Are you (considering) building a SaaS product on Drupal or running a Drupal hosting company? Have you done it already? Come share your experiences and learn from others.
On Saturday, August 11th, Christopher Gervais and I presented at Drupal North 2018. That's the annual gathering of the Drupal community in southern Ontario and Quebec, Canada.
My tenure with the Ægir Project only dates back about 7 or 8 years. I can’t speak first-hand about its inception and those early days. So, I’ll leave that to some of the previous core team members, many of whom are publishing blog posts of their own.
I've been mentoring students as part of Drupal's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program for the last two years, where we guide students in working on Drupal projects over the summer.
After the success of last year's GSOC project with Drupal, I thought it would be a great idea to see if we could take what we did there (server-side encryption) and do something similar on the client side. The benefit of this approach is that unencrypted content/data is never seen by the hosting server. So it's not necessary to trust it to the same degree.
The problem with most encryption strategies nowadays is that they require third-party software and/or services, require maintenance of additional keys and/or secrets, and provide an awful user experience.
I recently had a client that began delegating access to all of its data assets across the enterprise network via OAuth, specifically the OAuth 2.0 protocol. While I was there architecting a Drupal solution as their new Web platform, they wanted me to to hook into this system to authenticate their Drupal users. Although there have been some modules available in the ecosystem to support OAuth2, there weren't any available to provide this functionality. So I created the OAuth2 Authentication module.
As I've been architecting Drupal solutions for almost ten years now, I've accumulated quite a bit of knowledge on devops best practices, which constitutes a sizeable amount of the consulting that I do. This includes documentation, configuration management, development processes and deployment processes. In this article, I'll be introducing Drupal Helpers, a collection of standard scripts and configurations that I use on all of my client projects (where applicable).