Drupal

We had already let you know that we would be using Aloha Editor as the WYSIWYG editor in Spark. In short: it has a very complete feature set, a proven plug-in system, solid cross-browser support, it can do “nested editables”, and so on; but most notably it’s the best WYSIWYG editor out there that can do “true WYSIWYG”.

Sprint

The most notable goals were:

A few weeks ago, we showed the in-line editing prototype we had built for Spark, which has now blossomed into Edit module. Additionally, we also pointed out that we were in the process of selecting the WYSIWYG editor to use in Spark. This selection process was performed in the public Spark issue queue, in order to gather community feedback and to attempt to reach consensus. 73 people followed that issue, about two dozen of whom contributed to the discussion as well.

After working at Nascom for a very brief time, I will soon start working at Acquia! I’ll be working on the Spark project as a Senior Software Engineer in the Office of the CTO (OCTO), reporting directly to Dries!

Why I left Nascom

I chose Nascom because I felt it was the best fit for me. I really preferred working for a Belgian company. Nascom seemed to have it all¹, but in the end, it was not a good match. I still stand by my choice of Nascom being the best possible choice I could have made, when limiting my choices to Belgian companies. They’re great. But the spark was missing for me.

Speed up your Drupal site with a CDN in a few minutes.

The fun part: it’s nice to learn how to make any Drupal site significantly faster in a few minutes. The profit part: faster websites lead to more users and more revenue.

This article covers the common case: you have a small to medium size (≤1M page views per month), without massive amounts of large images, you’re using Drupal 7¹ and you only want to spend a few euros or (U.S.) dollars per month on a CDN. (You already know what a CDN is, right?)
So, you want your Drupal site to be faster, only spend a few minutes doing so, don’t want to deal with infrastructure and want to keep the costs very minimal. You’ve come to the right place.

Also: don’t worry about the cost: this little experiment will only cost you a few cents.

On January 2, I announced that I was looking for a job. Since that announcement, I’ve talked with >65 companies. I’ve had actual interviews with >30 of them. Most of them are based out of Belgium, some were remote. Many were Drupal shops, several were start-ups (some of which from Belgium, but most of which from the U.S.) but there were also many different types of companies. From very small to very big. So much choice!

(Also see The Paradox of Choice.)

Startup

Whenever I felt that a company was interested in possibly pursuing the start-up idea that I have had for a long time, I pitched it. The few times that I did this, there was a lot of enthusiasm. But only one company really pushed forward in pursuing this: Nascom. Funny enough, this also happened to be the company that offered me the most interesting, versatile and challenging job. This made me realize that a start-up (in Belgium!) might not be as unrealistic as I had first thought.

The time has finally come.

I’m looking for a job!

After ±5 years of hard work at Hasselt University, I will graduate as a master in computer science next month. I finished my master thesis and courses in June 2011 and have just completed my internship at Facebook a few weeks ago (on December 16). I’ve received an awesome job offer to work full-time at Facebook.

But my super-duper awesome girlfriend, Anneleen, is studying medicine here in Belgium. If she’d continue to study medicine in the U.S., she’d have to start all over, so that’s not really an option (not to mention the ridiculous costs). This summer, we’ll move in together in a (yet to be found) apartment in Leuven, Belgium.
Also, I just like Europe better than the United States.

I’ve already talked to several companies, months ago and more recently, but since there are so many interesting companies, projects and challenges out there, I decided to write this blog post.

My main interests (and areas of expertise) are:

• WPO (Web Performance Optimization): making websites faster
• Drupal
• data mining

Want to talk to me? Contact me at http://wimleers.com/contact.

Jacob Singh did a presentation at DrupalCon London about “How to have an open relationship … with software (and still make paper)”. I’m one of the people he interviewed for his presentation.

One of the questions he asked, was this one:

How do you use version control, spreadsheets, text files, napkins, etc to track your customizations to Drupal modules and core? Until the DOG project is done, what is the best worst practice here? On the Gardens team for instance, we used a PATCHES.txt file which listed the date, author, description and link for every patch to core or contrib. low tech, somewhat functional. How do you do this?

He liked my answer so much that he told me I should write a blog post about it — even if I’d just copy my answer verbatim. I’d been wanting to do that for years now. “Better late than never”, right? Although it’s actually too late now, because this system was actually designed to work when Drupal’s code still lived at http://cvs.drupal.org…

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be joining Facebook’s Site Speed team in Palo Alto, California on September 26, 2011 for a 12-week internship!

After almost two months of being in contact with Facebook, I finally got the liberating call with the verdict yesterday evening: I’ve been accepted!

Backstory {#backstory}

For those of you who want to read it, here’s the full backstory.

Excitement {#excitement}

On February 24, I was contacted via the contact form on my website by Jason Sobel of Facebook. He’s a member of the Site Speed team and mentioned their article about BigPipe (which is the technology they developed to make Facebook load twice as fast). Apparently he had come across my master thesis and my website (i.e. this website) and was interested in my work on making websites faster. Jason asked if I was up for a chat some time to find out what I’ve been working on and so he could give a sense of what the Facebook Site Speed team does. There even was a mention of possibly joining Facebook: “maybe our team would be an interesting opportunity for you?”.

This year, Performance Planet did an advent calendar again, just like last year. I was also invited to write an article, and gladly accepted the invitation. I wrote about WPO Analytics, which is what my master thesis is about. It’s quite strange to see your name appear among the big names of Yahoo, Facebook and Google, but at the same time it’s reassuring that my efforts have not been in vain.
The following article is a 1:1 copy of my “WPO Analytics” article for the 2010 Performance Calendar.

Introduction

Web performance monitoring services such as Gomez, Keynote, Webmetrics, Pingdom, Webpagetest (which was also featured in last year’s web performance advent calendar) and recent newcomers such as Yottaa are all examples of synthetic performance monitoring (SPM) tools.