The Drupal Association is pleased to announce that it has been selected to host Denaya Dennis, a Fellow from South Sudan in the 2023 Alumni Professional Development Experience (PDE) component of the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders from January 23 to March 3, 2023, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.

The Mandela Washington Fellowship, the flagship program of the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI), empowers young African leaders through academic coursework, leadership training, mentoring, networking, professional opportunities, and local community engagement.  YALI was created in 2010 and supports young Africans as they spur economic growth and prosperity, strengthen democratic governance, and enhance peace and security across Africa.  Since 2014, nearly 5,800 young leaders from every country in Sub-Saharan Africa have participated in the Mandela Washington Fellowship.  

New for 2023, 30 Fellowship Alumni have been competitively selected to take part in the 2023 Alumni PDEs – six-week virtual professional placements with U.S. non-governmental organizations, private companies, and government agencies.  PDEs allow Fellows to learn and grow as young professionals while providing enriching opportunities for U.S. organizations to participate in collaborative exchanges. 

Denaya Dennis Manoah Nigo is an ICT practitioner and a monitoring and evaluation specialist who founded his own organization, Koneta Hub, that provides programming to young people in digital literacy, incubation, and mentorship. He previously volunteered for four years as a teaching assistant at the University of Juba, with a focus on business-related courses, and hopes to continue working with university students in that capacity as early as next year. During the PDE, he wants to further develop his skills in organizational leadership, fundraising and multicultural engagements. Denaya successfully completed the Mandela Washington Fellowship in 2019, studying Leadership in Business at the University of Notre Dame. 

The Drupal Association serves the global Drupal community and is honored to cultivate professional development opportunities in collaboration with Denaya through community engagement strategy, local needs assessments, site-building skills, and high impact networking opportunities. 

The Mandela Washington Fellowship is a program of the U.S. Department of State with funding provided by the U.S. Government and administered by IREX.  For more information about the Mandela Washington Fellowship, visit mandelawashingtonfellowship.org, follow the Fellowship on Twitter at @WashFellowship, and join the conversation at #MandelaFellows.   

Press inquiries should be directed to ECA-Press@state.gov.

Internships and Fellowships

In this second part of a four-part series, Tessa talks about her background, the projects she's worked on, and the vision for her professional future

There is no one way to change a career path. Palantir.net’s four most recent fellows - Paak, Tessa, Travis, and Yang - all joined us through the DrupalEasy program. With their different professional backgrounds and experiences, each offers a unique perspective into what interested them in Drupal and their journey to becoming integral members of Palantir.net.

In each of their written entries they share, among other insights, how they have each adjusted to a fully-remote workplace, how their own skills supported their success as a Fellow, and the importance of Palantir.net’s culture which encourages asking questions, remaining curious, and reaching out for help.

This is Tessa's story.
 

Where I Started

I’ve always enjoyed learning about tech, mostly focused in hardware; building/maintaining computers, networking, etc. Initially, I didn't really see myself learning programming or coding beyond what was required to make the hardware work; over time, however, I started to figure out that most of the fun with technology was in software, so I began to work in this space. I was working in IT Support before I was fortunate enough to hear about Palantir.net’s Fellowship opportunity to attend DrupalEasy.

My previous experience with networking architecture and command line for computers gave me a bit of a head start with learning Drupal at DrupalEasy, but much of it was new to me. What encouraged me was how Mike Anello, the lead instructor and curriculum developer at DrupalEasy, was so thorough in not only covering the basics, but in encouraging and being available for any and all questions I may have. 

Although there is only so much that can be learned about any given subject in the space of only a few months, I was able to take what I learned and build on it in a meaningful way and continue to grow. I felt comfortable in my professional development during my Plantir.net Fellowship, never feeling I was out of my depth or beyond my scope of ability. 

As front-end or back-end are the easiest entry points, I opted for back-end and have been working on learning and growing as an engineer. Figuring out how code works is a challenge but quite rewarding once things click into place.

The supportive atmosphere and agile way of thinking and working that Palantir.net provided is unlike anything I’ve experienced before within a work environment. I am glad I received this opportunity and look forward to where it will lead.

Where I Am Now

An amazing number of Palantiri have contributed to my success and inspired me to grow. I’ve found myself torn in many potential directions of interest and growth that I’m now stuck with the happy challenge of what direction I would like to take in my professional future. Working with tech of any flavor, whether for work or as a hobby, is always an opportunity for learning, and I am glad to see so much potential for my own development and growth. 

Having been with Palantir.net for a while now, I’ve found that the entire team has been eager to provide opportunities and support when I’ve shown interest in growing and expanding my current knowledge base. I have already branched out into Dev-Ops and am now looking at some project ownership down the road, as well as more coding in general. 

Community Culture Drupal People

The Octoverse report Every year for the past 10 years, GitHub has released its Octoverse report , which takes a look at the state of open source. Late last year it released its 10th Octoverse report .   The stats and three open source trends The report starts off with some high level stats: 94M developers on GitHub 90% of companies use open source* 90%+ of Fortune 100 companies use GitHub 413M open source contributions in 2022 *The asterisk cites a 2021 report by OpenUK . The intro also highlights three trends:  Infrastructure as code is on the rise, e.g. the fastest growing language on GitHub was Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) Big tech is making an impact in open source , e.g.

I've been doing a bit of Drupal migration recently, and one of the tasks I have undertaken is to migrate "likes" from a Drupal 7 site to a Drupal 10 site.

The likes in the old Drupal 7 site were built using a custom module, with the Flag module was selected to provide the new functionality on the new Drupal 10 site. This meant that I needed to migrate the old custom structure into the entity structure provided by the Flag module.

To add further complication, it was possible to add likes to nodes and comments, which meant that the flags on the new side needed to be applied to two different types of entity. This was simple enough to do using two different types of flag entity; one for nodes and one for comments.

An added complication came from migrating from a single resource into what is essentially two different bundle types; this needed a bit of logic to be written, but was certainly possible in a single migration step. In fact, the decision I took was to migrate the likes as a single process, which meant that I could run or re-run the migration with a single command.

In this article I will go through each step of the migration process from source to destination, including the custom processing plugin created to aid the migration. This won't be a detailed breakdown of each component so some prior knowledge of the migration system is expected.

Setting Up The Flag Module

The flag module is well written (and well tested!) and allows for different types of flags to be added to different types of content. The Drupal 10 configuration consisted of two different types of flag; one to flag content and one to flag comments. We must create "Personal" flags when configuring the module here in order to allow content to be flagged by more than one user.

Read more

We recently deployed a feature on our website personalization engine that can select Drupal blocks based on the visitors. The Drupal part of this feature is implemented using the block_field.

"I’d like to see Drupal continue to expand its presence in the JavaScript community via official packages on NPM. Specifically, I’d like to see Drupal offer an official JavaScript client to interface with JSON:API," Brian expresses his wishful thinking in this interview. A must read for those who are into decoupled initiative.

Drupal's communities in Europe face some challenging thresholds to organize themselves. The communities have to deal with multiple languages, different legal settings, and cultural differences that complicate the organization of large events and the exchange of knowledge, funds, and other resources. A new move in online networking anticipates a favourable outcome.

What is Data Persistence? Editor Fri, 02/03/2023 - 16:05

What is data persistence, and why is it so important? Data persistence is a concept by which you can define the piece of information that will be stored on the device. Data persistence consists of all saved data in the storage system, which allows you to restore the value of this data at any time. You'll be able to restore all-important programs and info, even after a computer crash. Understanding the importance of persistence is essential to evaluate different storage systems accurately. You can lose your data by making the wrong choice. That is why it is worth considering the Drupal database migration. Any time a created process needs persistence, it's worth using non-volatile memory instead of volatile memory.

At Agaric, we perform a lot of Drupal upgrades. These very often involve transitioning away from older versions of PHP. Even when your hosting service provides multiple versions of PHP, you can still run into issues activating the appropriate one for each site: whether that's within the web server, at the command line, or via Drush (or other tools). In this blog post, we'll be providing remedies for all of these cases. Most content applies to any PHP application.

Read more and discuss at agaric.coop.