Hi! I’m Wim, live in the beautiful bike-centric city of Ghent and I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to work full time on making Drupal better & faster for over a decade now!
(I’m also interested in energy efficiency, smart home shenanigans and think more software empathy would make the world a better place.)


 

7 November, 2014
Conference
DrupalCamp Ghent
Location
Ghent, Belgium
Description

In Drupal 8, we’ve significantly improved the way pages are rendered. This talk explains the entire render pipeline, in some detail.

But it also covers:

Tags

5 January, 2014

This year, Performance Planet did an advent calendar again, just like the last few years. I also contributed an article — what follows is a verbatim copy of my “The real challenge: making the entire web fast” article for the 2013 Performance Calendar.

Probably many — if not most — of us speed freaks work for big companies that are optimizing top 1,000 websites.
Some companies have the budgets to hire people who work on WPO full time. Those companies are able to do that thanks to huge revenues — otherwise it would not be financially justifiable. In other words: they’re probably a top 1,000 website. The percentages of page speed improvements those people bring must translate into sufficient additional revenue to cover their wages.
Other companies have people who get to spend part of their time on WPO, and maybe pay for the services of one of the several WPO companies out there. But even in this case, a sizeable revenue is a requirement to justify it.

So what about the millions of other websites?

7 December, 2013
Conference
Drupagora 2013
Location
Paris, France
Description

For this short talk, I chose two particular improvements in Drupal 8 that will make a big difference for future Drupal sites’ performance and ops (infrastructure requirements).

The addition of cache tags is the most important new feature to have a huge impact on back-end performance: it allows for much smarter/better cache invalidation, and hence through better cache hit ratios help increase performance and reduce infrastructure requirements.

25 September, 2013
Conference
DrupalCon Prague
Location
Prague, Czech Republic
Description

Drupal 8 is going to have better front-end performance for anonymous users out of the box: it is now smart enough to no longer load unnecessary JavaScript. It’s also (finally!) going to cache all entities efficiently, so that it doesn’t waste time rerendering the same content over and over again.

Because less time needs to be spent on generating the HTML, the page will show up faster on visitors’ devices — also mobile devices.

4 August, 2013

My girlfriend and I both have an iPhone. Every night when we go to bed, we plug them in for charging. We also use them as our alarm clocks.

Until very recently, we did this by using the typical charger. Only my girlfriend’s side of the bed is rather far from a wall socket. So, she’d plug in a very long iPhone cable (that we got from Deal Extreme and was literally falling apart), but it was not quite long enough: she’d still have to get up (to reach for the phone, e.g. for turning off the alarm).
Plus, it was in my way to get to my side of the bed. So … several times I almost stepped on her iPhone, and many times I stumbled after getting stuck behind the cable. Less than ideal, right?

A very long time ago, on February 11, 2012, I backed the Elevation Dock Kickstarter for two docks. Somewhere in the beginning of 2013 I had received them. They’d been lying around in a closet, unused. A waste of money? I almost regretted ordering them.

Tags

7 July, 2013

What?

This article proposes a novel, simpler way of managing Drupal sites (where “managing” in this case is solely code updating & deployment).

It relies on only one command-line tool: mr (“a Multiple Repository management tool”, http://joeyh.name/code/mr/), plus a Drupal plug-in for that tool: mr-drupal, https://github.com/wimleers/mr-drupal.

Why?

If you run Drupal sites, you need some way to manage them; some way to keep them up-to-date. As of Drupal 7, there’s a built-in update manager, but it doesn’t use a VCS.

Most likely, you want use a VCS to manage your Drupal site. You may be downloading tarballs and checking their contents into your VCS, or maybe you’re using git submodules or even git-subtree. For all of these, there’s a whole lot of process, a lot of steps, a lot to learn, and a lot of tricky things you have to think about each time you want to update something. Too much that can go wrong.

31 May, 2013

Drupal 8 will ship with big authoring experience improvements: WYSIWYG editing & in-place editing, thanks to the Spark distribution that Acquia — my employer — is sponsoring.

But how well does it fare with the growing importance of structured content? Do Drupal 8’s WYSIWYG & in-place editing enable it or prevent it?

The new web world order: many form factors

The Big Thing of the last few years: the advent of mobile. Inherent to that: websites that are optimized for mobile devices and act as data providers for apps.

A new form factor — mobile devices — changed web development forever. Before mobile, the life of web developers and authors (content creators) was relatively simple: make sure websites work well on a few typical screen sizes (let’s deny the existence of Internet Explorer 6 and all the misery it caused).

But … we cannot predict what’s next. We cannot predict new content consumption form factors. That’s where content strategy becomes vitally important:

content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design