DDEV

One year ago I started tracking my own contributions to Drupal.org and posting a report on my Mastodon account. See the last quarter of 2025 report as an example. The goal is not to flex (it would be cheating given that Acquia sponsors me for working on Drupal Canvas almost full time); and this is far from being a good way of tracking contributions or your own productivity, but it's better than nothing. 

Still, it helps me evaluate where I've been focusing (out of necessity, from being nerdsniped, or just for fun), and check if I need to balance that for my "volunteer" contributions. In this last year I've been appointed as Drupal CMS committer (which includes maintainership of 20+ projects 😱😱😱), and Drupal Core subsystem maintainer for Content Translation and Language modules. So tracking where my efforts go is really helpful for self-accountability.

And to be fair, I spent more time maintaining this blog than writing, so finding a new topic that is recurrent is a good way to force me to keep it up to date 😅.

In the last 4 quarters I've been tracking this, it's been ~1 credit per day among all projects. Last quarter I had credits at 1295 issues. As of now, it's 1376. So 81 new credits, vs 93 last quarter, which is a little below 1 credit/day.

Breaking those down:

Canvas: 143 (+61)
Core: 150 (+8)
CMS*: 42 (+4)
Dashboard: 61 (+3)

I also enjoy contributing to projects like DDEV, which helps me learn Golang and clear my mind from working on the same stack. Recently I've been working on Add --project/-p flag to ddev exec command to target a named DDEV project from any directory and it was just merged! 

And I've been pushing a bit this quarter to keep the Drupal Canvas development DDEV add-on up to date, with several improvements and releases.

Hope to write again before July 1st!

Happy coding! 🎉🎉

I've been a very late adopter of Docker containers. Probably because most of my work in the last years was not dependent on the PHP version, so I used the same PHP version and MySQL/MariaDB as RDBMS every time. For a server I managed I played with LXC as a container system, and served quite well, but I didn't really need to touch it often, and my friend Andrés helped most of the times. Docker seemed confusing to me and, hold my beer, I thought it wouldn't stay, so I didn't really want to learn it. You might say now that my career as seer is over.

Not easily but I got to understand it, and really embraced and loved tools like docker-compose on top of docker. And when I had to work on a Drupal site using Postgres, my best bet was DDEV, abstracting docker-compose complexities but with all the freedom to customize it for your needs.  So that's my platform of choice most of the times in terms of local environments now. And lucky us, it's open source.

And the implicit non-enforced well-citizen contract of opensource is that you have to contribute back if you get the chance to improve it*. In minor contributions I've done before I found the DDEV community really encouraging and welcoming, thanks Randy! So lately I was in the need of  detecting performance bottlenecks in a site, and I've been working on integrating the provided XHProf with XHGui into DDEV. I recently contributed the recipe so you can use it too in less than 5 minutes! See it here: XHGui integration in DDEV documentation. 

* Needed clarification: not saying that you have to give back, not everyone has the same privilege than I do. But *if you did accomplish it already, try to contribute it*. 

If you enable XHProf, already provided with DDEV, it already monitors your application, but you need to collect that profiling report and send it somewhere where you can explore it in a friendly way. That's where perftools/php-profiler comes into play. It has the ability to manage which data you want to profile, and send it to XHGui. XHGui will run on a separate container, will receive the data profiled, store the data in a mongodb database in another container, and render it to you on the browser, where you can see several listings, graphs and images that will help you understand what's going on on your application. You can also compare different requests to a same page, so you see how the performance evolves too. Interpretation of that data is a complex topic on its own, so I won't go deeper here.

So the good news is that you can integrate that now into any project you have with DDEV, in less than 5 minutes. The docs are specific for Drupal 8+ (a composer project) and WordPress (a non-composer project, kudos to roots/bedrock for changing that), so that probably covers examples for any PHP application out there.  Hope this helps!

As a bonus track, I also worked on a DDEV command for enabling/disabling xhprof without having to restart  your project, type a very long command or ssh into the container. That's on that DDEV-contrib page too, but it's probably going to be accepted upstream in DDEV soon too.

Thanks Randy "rfay" Fay, Andrey "andypost" Postnikov and Mateu "e0ipso" Aguiló for the feedback, help and inspiration on working on this!