John began his career developing e-learning and expert systems before moving into business application and web development. He co-founded Sereno with Rod fifteen years ago. John concentrates on developing digital strategies with Sereno's charity partners and leads on design.
When we first started using Agile to manage our projects, we were delighted with the idea of valuing "working software over comprehensive documentation". In waterfall project management, documentation was used all too often as a way of simply mitigating risk. So reams of paper were wasted, as documentation bloated and became unmanageable in any practical sense.
Last weekend saw the best ever Drupal Camp in Brighton. A huge turnout and a great array of sessions and speakers all brilliantly organised by the team. I had many highlights but here are a just a couple of tasty takeaways that stuck.
We've used a lot of approaches to time tracking over the years. Everything gets noted down so can we supply reports on time to our clients and we can learn how to better monitor and improve our time usage.
I recently attended an inspirational Open Source event. This was kindly hosted by Brighton company Omnis Systems. It was really inspiring to see the range of Open Source systems available as alternatives to the usual proprietary offerings.
We recently had a requirement to add a sign up form for a series of events. We've produced a number of bespoke solutions in the past which required a fair amount of coding but this use case was for a straightforward generic event registration procedure so it seemed obvious to turn to one of the standard Drupal modules to do this.
We've written a huge number of forms over the years (mainly using PHP or Symfony) and can pretty much produce most customisable forms that are required. But using Webform within Drupal has been a real game-changer for us. While we'll still create custom code for some specific form tasks, I'd say that Webform answers at least 50% of the typical use cases that face us on a daily basis.