alvin alexander

programming

Drupal 8: How to write a simple custom “block module”

By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: August 7 2018

Table of Contents

  1. Goals
  2. Backup your database
  3. Check my code out of Github, or create a module directory
  4. Create a project info YAML file
  5. Create the necessary subdirectories
  6. Write the code to display your block
  7. Clear the caches
  8. Enable the module
  9. Place the block module
  10. See the custom block on your website
  11. The biggest problem I encountered
  12. The source code
  13. Summary
Table of Contents1 - Goals2 - Backup your database3 - Check my code out of Github, or create a module directory4 - Create a project info YAML file5 - Create the necessary subdirectories6 - Write the code to display your block7 - Clear the caches8 - Enable the module9 - Place the block module10 - See the custom block on your website11 - The biggest problem I encountered12 - The source code13 - Summary

In this tutorial I’ll demonstrate how to write a simple Drupal 8 “block module.” By this I mean that I’ll show you how to write a simple Drupal 8 module that will display output in a block. When you’re done you will have created a new block that you can place in one or more theme regions.

Functional programming leads to happiness alvin December 16, 2018 - 5:35pm

As I wrote in Functional Programming, Simplified, functional programming can lead to happiness (and sanity). The quotes in this slide from Rúnar Bjarnason’s FP talk expand on what I wrote in my book. They keys are that pure functions are very simple, and you don’t have to constantly worry about the mutable state in your application.

A nice story about Lisp

By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: October 17 2018

twobithistory.org has a nice story about Lisp titled, How Lisp became God’s own programming language. That page links to Paul Graham’s old Beating the averages post where he shares this Eric Raymond quote: “Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.”

The lack of type safety was difficult to scale ... alvin July 15, 2018 - 1:36pm

From this AirBnB article about using React Native: “JavaScript is an untyped language. The lack of type safety was both difficult to scale and became a point of contention for mobile engineers used to typed languages who may have otherwise been interested in learning React Native ... A side-effect of JavaScript being untyped is that refactoring was extremely difficult and error-prone.”

The 90/90 Rule of software development

By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: July 15 2018

The 90/90 Rule: “The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.”

~ Tom Cargill

If at first you don’t succeed ... alvin June 9, 2018 - 11:23am

I was reminded of this “If at first you don’t succeed, call it Version 1.0” saying this morning. You can find this t-shirt on Amazon if you’re interested.

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