See the original article on Nichebench and how we spent some credits and figured out how well do the models perform in the Drupal field.

New models

In the last 2-3 months more models appeared on the radar, and some were very very interesting:

• Kimi K2 Thinking (latest-latest) - 1T Params (32B active)
• Kimi K2 Instruct 0905 - 1T Params (32B active)
• Kimi Linear - 48B (3B active)
• GLM 4.6 - 355B (32B active)
• MiniMax M2 - 230B (10B active)
• IBM Granite 4 Small - 32B (9B active)
• Nemotron Super - 49B - dense
• Nemotron Ultra - 253B - dense (?)

Some of these models showed really good results in various benchmarks 👇

SWE-bench Verified (Software Engineering):

• Kimi K2 Thinking: 71.3% (claimed)
• MiniMax M2: 69.4% (claimed)
• GLM-4.6: 68.20%
• Kimi K2 Instruct: 65.8%
• GPT-OSS-120B: 62.4% - for reference

Termi...

In this article, we’ll be putting our second-hand AMD Threadripper 1950x to some inference tests 🔥 - can you already smell some overheated plastic? No? That’s because the be quiet! is at the heart of our QuietBee 🐝😎

Quick intro - Niche AI trajectory

Alright, let’s take a step back - we’ve built the base for our AI home-lab (called QuietBee) - but as long as the GPU’s aren’t here yet - QuietBee just sits there without any work 😟. However, while doing some Nichebench testing - we had to use some local models - and we did run some random non-optimized CPU inference on the QuietBee - and it was quite okay (yielding 5-10 tokens, depending on the model).

But wait. Why are we doing this at all, you’re asking? I got you → we’re on our path to build open-weight Niche AI models - fine-tuned flavors ...

1. 🧭 Introduction - Why We're Building QuietBee

On our HumanFace Tech journey into the niche AIs 🤖, we will definitely need a small AI home lab for fine-tuning, creating synthetic data, and inference testing. So, throughout the spring and summer of 2025, we were analyzing how we could build a powerful AI lab for under €2000.

We currently have an RTX 3060 with 12 GB of VRAM, and it was enough to try out different quantized models, either via llama-cpp or Ollama. It was also enough to do some fine-tuning on small quantized models, like we did in this article.

But for proper fine-tuning, we need way more VRAM and a separate machine that can work for a few hours or even days 📅 if needed (without blocking the main day-work desktop).

Initially, we set our eyes on being able to run, at inference,...

Introduction

Finally, this article took me ~ 2 months to write-up 📅 - mostly because coming up with Nichebench, creating test-cases and running slowly the tests against many existing LLMs.

Let’s start with this - not all LLMs are created equally. The data they are trained on, the formatting of the data, the labelling, the used underlying architecture and many other parameters - heavily influence the final result. Some LLMs might be good at coding 🧑‍💻, but when prompted about Drupal 10 or Drupal 11 implementation, might creep-out some Drupal 7-flavor solutions - or plainly hallucinate some slop as a reply 😵

Most of us get around these issues, by just throwing more money at this problem - i.e. picking Claude Sonnet 4 (or Opus) - or using up Github Copilot’s paid credits.

Very few of us play wi...

Introduction

Hi there! I’m diving into the unknown 🤿 - fine‑tuning open‑weight models to see what goodies I can bake. Quick heads‑up: I’m a web‑dev that tinkers with AI (LangChain / LangGraph, etc.), not a formal ML researcher, but I’m pretty curious about AI and its impact on our lives 🤖.

Before we begin - if you're more a hands-on and a visual person, I also made a video ▶ that goes along with this article.

Okay, but why go through with all of that? Well, there’s a lot to unpack:

• 🤓 Just learn fine-tuning, get a bit into the weeds of AI training, etc.
• 🏋️‍♂️ Challenge - see if I can get some new knowledge & facts baked into existing LLM models
• 🛠️ Build on top of that - what’s my “North Star”? I’m targeting building niche specialized models - think: models that are great at Drupal coding, W...

Hey there, this is my Drupalcon-experience review, all the views/opinions here are mine and don’t extend to the company or partners I work with.

This was my second Drupalcon in general, and first one in North America - I used to be cautious about attending Drupalcons because the pricing can be quite prohibitive for small businesses, freelancers, and independent devs… I do enjoy DrupalCamps though - my 1st being BADCamp (US), then followed by camps in Ukraine, Romania and the ones we organized in Moldova, I think I attended ~6 camps and co-organized 3 more.

This year, thanks to Dropsolid, I had the chance to visit the US-flavored Drupalcon. This time it was in Atlanta, Georgia - in the Hyatt Regency Hotel. The venue was pretty fancy, I’d say - classy. I liked it, although not sure it was ca...

What's Vibe-coding? 🚀

A few weeks ago, I was casually browsing the web and stumbled upon Andrej Karpathy's tweet about vibe-coding.

It had some really interesting replies - I realized I'm not alone! 😄

There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe-coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because LLMs (like Cursor Composer w/ Sonnet) are getting too good.

Some people define vibe-coding as a spectrum (I like this view as well). When I can (read: when company policies allow it), I'm vibing comfortably around 6–7 out of 10. Here's how:

• I rarely write code (just corrections).

• I talk (via voice) to AI (GitHub Copilot – Claude 3.7 Sonnet).

• I give precise details of what I want 0 classes, methods, APIs, etc.

• I manu...

Let’s talk about productivity 📈 - I use AI pretty frequently (duh, shocker! 😊). In VSCode, Github Copilot works pretty well, but still from a case to case, after it does a bunch of suggestions and alterations - some things still aren’t as perfect as I’d expect. I find myself constantly explaining to AI simple things:

• “don’t forget to use Drupal 10’s best practices…”
• “where are the dependencies? Hello! Dependency injections!”
• “It seems you forgot to add that interface to the newly created service…”

Or, outside of the VSCode, when I’m just brainstorming some ideas with ChatGPT or Claude, I find myself typing and typing and typing, essays of pages, running prompts, back and forward.

Typing takes too much time - I tend to gravitate to AI Mic-input built-in the OpenAI Mobile App (because they...

Hey hey folks! I’ve been quiet for a while - as I was in the process of switching jobs and onboarding a new company - Dropsolid. Now I’m back with some new experiments and ideas - let’s dive into this one 👇

I noticed that many (or, some) IT companies don’t fully trust to share their code-base with some of the big players like Microsoft / Github or OpenAI - and they’re right to do so:

• many developers aren’t aware that all the opened files are automatically sent to these companies as a context, including such files as .env or .sql - with all the secrets that they have;
• even experienced developers might accidentally open these local files and they will be sent away;
• this also plays badly with data compliance and IT security, especially when IP (intellectual property) should not leave the co...

Do you have a sizable website with hundreds of images lacking SEO-friendly alt/title attributes? Discover how AI can remedy this. 🌐

The Importance of Image Alt/Titles in SEO

When it comes to websites with images, having alt and title attributes in HTML isn't just good practice – it's essential. There are numerous articles explaining why, like HubSpot’s Article on Image SEO and Semrush’s Article on Image SEO.

If you have just a few images, you can (should?) just edit those manually and specify those attributes. But what about platforms hosting hundreds? Or those with user-contributed images? Usually we try to simplify image uploads for users and we remove the extra text-fields - so the images end up without any attributes. Here’s where AI becomes your ally. 💡

The AI Solution: Image-t...

In this article I’ll talk about how I am using ChatGPT, and if you find it useful, maybe it will help you be more productive as well.

Introduction: The Power of ChatGPT Personas 🌟

ChatGPT has revolutionized our AI interactions, especially with the latest GPTs — preconfigured chatbots equipped with tailored system messages, knowledge bases, and API calls. Imagine tailoring ChatGPT to fit your specific needs.

But what if creating custom GPTs for short, specific tasks seems too daunting? Starting a new GPT each time can be tedious, requiring you to detail the AI's behavior and tone from scratch. What if you need a custom interaction just for 2-3 hours, and then discard it?

One way would be to create a simple new ChatGPT thread and explain in detail how you’d expect it to behave - but, that’s...

1. Introduction and Motivation

During our daily work, we often get tangled up in little tasks that keep eating our time. Think about all those documents we need to open for a single answer or all the time we spend on Confluence or Notion hunting for the info we need. These tasks are like mosquitoes on a summer night - small but distracting, and they keep us from focusing on the big picture.

ChatGPT has been pretty good at handling some of these issues, much like it has for countless other teams. But we wanted to go a bit further and push the envelope. Here's what was on our wish list:

1. Collaborative chat: We wanted to have a real group chat with ChatGPT, not a series of disjointed conversations. ChatGPT does offer share-links, but those aren’t real collaborations, as each person continues ...

Unleashing the Magic of AI: Crafting a Custom, ChatGPT-powered Voice Assistant with MagicMirror², PicoVoice (Porcupine), Whisper, and Mimic3.

Introduction - The Genesis of Our AI-Powered Voice Assistant

Both my wife and I find ourselves relying on ChatGPT on a daily basis, leveraging its capabilities for a broad spectrum of tasks. Whether it's SEO, content editing, code-writing, discovering various tools and libraries, or analyzing market dynamics and sales strategies, we're continually amazed by the transformative impact of Language Learning Model (LLM) technologies like ChatGPT on our productivity.

Driven by her passion for Product Management, my wife was intrigued by the idea of building something innovative around AI, with the dual objectives of understanding the strengths and weakness...

Introduction

Nowadays, the selection of a production environment and deployment strategy often depends on the platform in use. As a Drupal developer, my focus is primarily on Drupal-based websites, although the principles I'll discuss can be applied to numerous other frameworks and CMSs.

When working with clients, the choice of deployment strategy often depends on their preferences. Some clients have clear-cut requirements for using platforms like Pantheon or Acquia, which simplifies the configuration process on our end. Others prefer AWS services like Fargate or Elastic Beanstalk, or they may have a dedicated on-premises server that requires a more bespoke setup.

For personal projects, the choice is broader (as you have more freedom) but not without constraints. Factors such as budget 💰, ...

Due to recent events (Russia starting a war in Ukraine), many of our friends from Moldova and Ukraine are asking us various questions about Valencia and Spain, why we have decided to live here, what are our expenses, what is our life like, etc. I decided to write up an article that covers these topics - might be useful for others as well. If you’re a Ukrainian IT professional analyzing where to settle within the EU - consider strolling through this article.

I’m a remote worker / IT professional - so I’ll write things from my subjective experience and world-view. On my previous experiences and travels as a remote worker and digital nomad - I wrote in this article.

Why Spain?

Let’s start with the origins - we’re originally from Moldova - a tiny country in the East of the European continent. ...

Problem / Motivation:

The problem I wanted to solve was - to apply image styles (especially with the Image Effects module), on images, but dynamically & on-demand, and not use dozens of pre-configured Image Styles.

Why would anyone want something like this? I can give you a couple of examples:

• Facebook / Twitter Preview image, for every post. Let’s say you want Drupal to generate an image, by using Post Cover, Post Date, Title and potentially slap on some tags - and compile a Facebook compatible final image.
• Gift Card Generator 🎴 - where users have a set of pre-configured options they may choose, colors, fonts, texts and use some pre-defined layouts to put everything together.
• Dynamic Watermarks 🖼 - allow users to upload their own watermarks and apply those on top of their images - wi...

If you want to get around Netlify's initial limitations (and not to be billed accidentally, once you surpass it) - you could use CircleCI for the build process ⚙ and then deploy to Netlify ☁

Why CircleCI?

Netlify provides a simple, out-of-the-box building & deployment process. You basically specify the Base directory, the Build Command, Publish directory - and you’re done.

Usually that’s more than enough to build a Gatsby.JS website - however Netlify offers 300 minutes of build-time per month, and if you exceed this, they will automatically charge you.

Another issue that comes with Netlify - it allows only a 15 min build process, if your website has many images, it might exceed this limit and you will suddenly fail ? to publish new versions.

CircleCI - has a free tier that offers ...

If you’re running Drupal + Gatsby.JS website, you’ll inevitably change the URLs of some of these articles (i.e. by changing the title) → and this will change the slug (URL) →and this will cause 404s (i.e. break all Social Media posts, etc). There’s a way to fix it.

The Reason

This depends on the case, in my case (and many other examples I’ve seen) - the slugs are generated by using Drupal's path aliases. And Drupal’s paths depend (usually) on the node’s title.

This has unforeseen consequences, once you change the title, the path is changed too and on the next build, Gatsby will stop recognizing the old paths, resulting in 404s. This happened to me - when I wanted to rename the initial article as “Part 1” (because I’ve written a “Part 2” later), all my social-media posts were broken and Goo...

If you have a decoupled Gatsby + Drupal site, then you’re probably annoyed waiting for 5-10 minutes for the build to finish - to see how your CMS changes landed on the actual website. There’s a better way - Gatsby Previews (took me a while to look into it). With Live Previews you can view your new and edited content instantly.

How to enable the Preview

There’s this neat contrib module - called “Gatsby” - https://www.drupal.org/project/gatsby

It consists of 4 different sub-modules:

• Gatsby - Improves integration with GatsbyJS including adding Live Preview and Incremental Builds;
• Gatsby Fast Builds - Enables faster Gatsby development builds by only downloading content that has changed;
• Gatsby JSON:API Extras - Adds additional enhancers when using Gatsby with JSON:API;
• Gatsby JSON:API Instan...

Ever had to have 2+ Dropbox free-tier accounts to get more storage? Ever had full Google Drive (including Google Photos) or any other service? Here I will explain how we’ve set up our own Private Cloud (oh, it’s free and open-source).

Note: “Cloud” can have many meanings, here we’re basically talking about an online storage solution - it also doubles as a chat-server (audio/video), streaming server, etc - basically NAS (Network Attached Storage) with bells and whistles; and not “Cloud” in terms of Google Cloud or AWS.

Who is it for? ?
Basically it’s for anyone who’s interested in having on-site, private cloud - a solution to which you can connect all your devices (Windows, Linux, Android, etc.) and sync the data between them. It also offers extra tools such as Chat (text / audio / video), ...

Welcome to 2nd part - hands-on or deep-dive into Drupal 8 + Gatsby.JS. Don’t treat this article as a tutorial - but hopefully, my experience will be useful for your journey.

Who is it for? ?

If you’re a beginner that has some experience with Drupal (or even if you’re pretty new to it) - during some 3-4 days, you can have a full-running website, secured, fast, and with zero hosting costs. If you want to experiment, learn something new, create a professional or personal blog, a product landing page, a business website, you name it - then it’s for you.

How much time? ⌚

It really depends on your knowledge and skills. It took me 5-8 days, but I mostly did around 2-3 hours per day (maybe with a weekend spike), that’s why I consider it 3-4 days (full-time). It also depends on the approach and tem...

While participating as a mentor for a small startup event, I realized that many people weren’t aware of some of the amazing tools you can use for your startup or small business. So I decided to share these in this article ?.

Many people are now transitioning online or start their business (due to pandemic) - and a bit of knowledge sharing can be useful to all. Also, if you know some better tools or if I missed anything, please comment down below ?.

Note: most tools are free or cheapest alternatives to the popular ones.

Email and Emails Campaigns ✉️

Emails are very important. When you start a business, you want to be able to send emails from your domain, i.e. from name@domain.com - and this usually leads to the setup of mail-server - a thing I tried many times and after many hours I always ...

Let’s talk about Games - I mean, Computer Games (about board games as well, but in a later post). I think that people (and especially developers) are split between 2 factions: games are bad for you vs games are good for you, however, let’s face it, in 2020-2021 - the time when any type of travel is a remote dream (at times even outside of your city / town), games are good for mental sanity no matter to what faction you belong to.

I used to play a lot when I was a teenager, starting with Sega Mega-Drive ?, and then discovering PC ? and its wonderful games, thanks to my older brothers. I think I was pretty addicted to them - but then I slowly lost interest and shifted my focus to other things.

However in recent years I have revisited Steam and I was constantly poking around the library and k...

Blog running on Drupal 7 (or any other CMS)

Running a self-hosted blog has its challenges - and I bumped into some of those eventually. Well, rather than running out of ideas / motivation or time to come up with new articles, I eventually had some technical problems: Updates & Security - being the most important one ? ?.

If you’re using a self-hosted blog, you eventually will need to do constant updates. The more popular engine you’re using - the more risks of being hacked and the more up-to-date you have to be (especially if you’re running on Wordpress). I am kinda lazy, so eventually I skipped some big updates and my hosting got hacked. And this happened many times.

Many hacking waves are automated - they just crawl the web, identify Drupal websites and try commonly known expl...

Haven’t written anything since 2015, a lot has happened since then: I’ve found my love and got married, lived a digital nomad life-style, tried various projects and startups, switched jobs, relocated and settled down in a new country - to name a few. In this post I’ll cover some of these points - but I’ll mainly focus on what it meant to work remotely and how the 2020 pandemic changed this (for the good, and for the bad).

Transition

In 2015 - I was mainly living off freelance projects. I was living in Moldova, usually I’d have local clients, which I’d meet in-person and I’d develop either websites, or feature requests for them. Later, same year, together with Afinika - we’ve started to travel, and while we were in Israel, I was still freelancing for some of my clients, handling some issue...

If you haven't heard yet, we've announced earlier that Moldcamp 2015 is on it's way! Second edition of the Drupal Camp hosted by a small country in the Eastern Europe - Moldova.

Last year we've held the 1st event and we had pretty good results, 140 attendees, 33 sessions, 9 sponsors, tons of partners, 2 days worth of session and an awesome party!

We were late with the website, so now there are just 2 weeks to submit the sessions. And just 1 week before the event the schedule will be published, so don't hesitate and submit. Speakers will be rewarded with Tshirts, free passes, accommodation discounts (this applies to attendees as well) and bottles of sweet Moldovan wine!

Submit your sessions here: http://moldcamp.com/

What you should expect this year?

• Better Internet Connection - as we have...

I know, it's been a while since the event took place (17th - 18th of May), I was pretty busy and had a lot of stuff to do meanwhile, so I finally found a couple of hours to make a small review.

Here we go.

CXO Dinner

That's the night where all CXOs (Silver and Gold Sponsors) gather together for a dinner to discuss business and other interesting things. We've chosen a nice small cozy place in the heart of Chisinau - Karl Schmidt. Everyone showed up except for one of the sponsors. Everything was paid by the Drupal Moldova as a part of the Moldcamp project.

It went very well. It was just 1 night before the Moldcamp event has taken place so that was the perfect timing to ask for CXOs to bring their marketing material for the event with them.

Registration / Preparation

We've got early in the ...

Alright!

We are getting closer and closer the our long-waited event - Moldcamp. What is Moldcamp? Well, it our very first DrupalCamp held in Moldova. We've worked your butts off to make it as nice as we can.

I will tell you in details how we've organized it and what were the principles of doing that, buuuut not in this article, I'll cover all those details in an article which will be posted after the event.

Anyway I'm posting this article just to get the message out there and to get some of our stats that we've reached so far (today we've closed the sessions submissions and we'll do the schedule, which will be posted later in this article).

In a beautiful graphical form (yes, FlatUI Icons), we have:

Aaaand speaking of knowledge base and proposed sessions, check out some of the sessions:

...

It's been a while since I've organised the 1st Drupal event in Moldova (to be precise 7 of January 2011 - Drupal 7 Release Party).

Since then, we've learned a lot by working on different projects in different countries.

Since then, more and more Drupal companies opened their offices in our country.

Since then, we've visited couple of Drupal Camps and Cons, in Ukraine, Romania, US, Germany, etc.

Since then, we had tons of events, official (such as Drupal Global Training Day) and informal (such as beer-offlines). And now, we're aiming even higher: first Drupal Camp in Moldova.

After founding Drupal Moldova Association, we always had in mind that we are going to finally organize this event.

Now that we're here, we want to organize one of the best camps you'll ever visit :)

Alright, so, how d...

We (Drupal Moldova Association) have put things together last week, to creating a really awesome one-page static website for Drupal Global Training Day, here in Moldova.

And here's how we did it.

Instead of implementing a Drupal Instance or instead of simply creating an event on http://www.meetup.com/, we've decided to create an animated one page website, which will include the following:

• Mission
• Information about Drupal (videos + info badges)
• Quotes from local developers
• Info about the Training
• Info about the Speakers
• Partners (Sponsors)
• Registration form
• E-mail subscription and Contacts

Corina Ciripitca, a designer which is also a friend of Drupal Moldova Association, has helped us with the design of the website, and she did a really great job!

I thought we have to share our experienc...

This will be a very short article where I'll just share a small problem I've encountered recently and how I've solved it.

I had a small task: I needed to sort the links in a forum node. I thought it would be an easy one, but heh, you have to love Drupal :)

First idea was to go in the theme_preprocess_node() (or, in case we use Omega and we follow best practices, we create preprocess-node.inc file under the preprocess folder) and to change the '#weight' of the links as I like it.

But if you just check how drupal_pre_render_links function works, we'll see that it just loops through the elements, igoring their '#weight' what so ever. So, which module had a higher weight in the system table, will have its links show up as last, as it was the last module which attached something to the node's c...

For the past two months or so, we were working hard to create a non-profit organization that will be responsible for lots of Drupal-related local things, such as: events, trainings, workshops, showcases, partnerships, local drupalcamp, etc.

We are still in the process, but we are ready to announce the launch of Drupal Moldova Association. There are a lot of things to be done, such as our website and internal organization structure, but we are working hard to make it happen.

We have an office, we have a team, we have tons of people working with Drupal and contributing to the community, we have tons of local companies working with Drupal, we have local meet-ups and a lot of people eager to learn Drupal.

We've created a small infographic about Drupal Evolution / Roadmap in Moldova (high quali...

Recently an interesting event took place here in Moldova - our very own first business conference. As it was planned, this event was pretty big (and expensive): around 500 participants, 4 conferences and 12 workshops, 2 business networking events, different presents and stuff.

I must say the event was organized pretty good. Organizers were very responsive (when I asked them via Twitter to move the flip board because it was blocking the screen, they replied and moved it within a minute) and they tried to be on time with everything (which is a pretty complicated task here in Moldova). All of the marketing approaches, short video interviews, branded notebooks, even a map with places to eat nearby, tons and tons of partners and some sponsors - I think guys were really dedicated.

The room was f...

A couple of days ago, while I was scrolling down on my Facebook wall, I've noticed a shared article about a local project "UpGreat: IT & Business" (organized by AIESEC). I contacted the coordinator of the project and after some discussions I got the full picture of the project:

This project was for high-school students that want to know more things about IT & Business, it also would include such workshops as: WordPress, Java, Android, etc.

So I thought that a Drupal workshop would fit perfectly in this context. Except for the Drupal Global Training Day that we've organized last year with Propeople, there are basically no events which target newcomers, and newcomers are very important for the existence and growth of local & international Drupal Community.

I'm actually not aware ...

Around 2 weeks ago I left Propeople and, of course, I want to share bits of experience I got from the company, community, projects we've worked on, and so on.

When I got employed at Propeople here in Moldova, it was a smallish department made-up from 10 people or so. I've worked at the company for around 2 years (almost) and I must say, we progressed a lot. Now-days we're around 40 employees here and still hiring.

I learned Drupal as a freelancer and Drupal community helped me a lot in my studies (especially IRC channel). But I had no projects where I would need to do Migration or even use Panels (for instance). So as a freelancer you have the freedom to do anything, but the projects will stay pretty much "simple". The other disadvantage of freelancing is that you don't have anyone around...

Binding between developers and themers, or how backend developers have to prepare things to be themed by frondend developers.

Today I held a quick session (I know I know, it lasted for more than an hour) at Propeople regarding an important topic oh how developers should prepare things for themers (frontend developers). How you decide what theme to pick, how to create subtheme, how to keep everything clean on theme and module level, what are the string formatting and utility functions and so on.

For anyone interested enjoy the presentation beneath (or there's a public link to a Google Presentation):

Finally, I had a trip I really needed, a trip to the west: Romania. I didn't visit our neighboring country for years, and seeing that a DrupalCamp will be held in Arad really brought a smile on my face.

Our comany (Propeople, btw they also have a blog article about this trip) has sponsored our trip - so that was the 2nd part that brought a smile on my face. We were 3 guys: me, Alex and Stefan. I had to hold 2 sessions: Drupal Migration and Drupal Services & Backbone.js (the one I held at Kiev DrupalCamp) and Alex had to talk about Speeding up Drupal.

The trip

The trip was awesome, it took us 15 hours to get to Arad. Lots of streets in Romania were rebuilt and mixing that with intense fog resulted in an interesting driving experience.

Arad is a small cute city, first night we walked ar...

Most of us know that Views module has its own Ajax functionality. If we enable the ajax checkbox in the view settings, a bunch of Ajax-related JavaScript files will be loaded for us on our views' page.

One of the files which will be loaded is:

 /views/js/ajax_view.js

If we drill down this file and analyze it, we will understand some of the Views' ajax functionality. Lets take a case and see how we can reuse Views' Ajax.

Reloading a View with specific arguments via Ajax:

Lets say we have 2 views on the same page, for instance we use Panels and we have a left-side view and a content view. The content view is empty on the first page load, but when user selects something in the left-side view we want to reload dynamically the content view with specific arguments passed to it.

First idea that c...

This article will cover Field Collection module as a concept overall and we'll also look into some programming details.

Field Collection module a "field collection" field. This field is actually represented by an entity of type "field collection item". And as any entity, it's fieldable, so one can attach as many fields as he wants to a bundle of a field collection item. It can also store lots of values, just like any other field. The advantage of Field Collection is that it also embeds the editing form of the field collection item's fields.

One can view and edit field collections separately.

When you define field collections, you can go anytime to this path, and editing them: /admin/structure/field-collections

And here's an example of a Field Collection and why we would use it: lets sup...

I want to share what I consider to be the "Drupal way" of working with fields. Here we will go through such things as rendering fields, retrieving values of the field, and saving values in fields.

So, lets begin.

Most of the people work with fields this way. They usually drill down the whole entity that was loaded, whether it's a node or user entity or any other fieldable entity.

 
// load a node entity with entity id 3
$entity = entity_load_single('node', 3);
// get the value of the field by drilling down the object
$value = $entity->field_tags['und'][0]['tid'];
// now we got the value of the field (which is a taxonomy reference field, that's why we have 'tid' instead of the default 'value' key)

But that's the wrong way of doing that, as we don't know what's the language used in this field a...

This is just an intro into one of the crazy weeks I had this year.

I just want to log this one, even for myself, so that I will compare other crazy weeks to this one. So, here we go.

This article will be about an epic week which started on Monday 10th of September and ended on 15th September.Overall I was working on one of the most important projects for Propeople, where we had a small preview-deadline on that Wednesday night. We were working hard on the project, mostly senior developers, but our deliverables were in a tight schedule and because of the importance of the project, we were doing everything the right way (the Drupal way), no hardcodings and hack-approaches. I must say I've learned a lot about working with Field API, Views Handlers and Ctools. Because of the tight schedule, mos...

Hey hey, I've wasted a couple of hours recently in a search of a better IDE than NetBeans and I want to share my experience with you guys.

Why not NetBeans?

Well, lots of times it's really slow. Slow in terms of function definition look-up, autocompletion and overall project browsing and everything that has to do with the IDE itself. Don't get me wrong, I do like NetBeans, I like it more than huge and clusmy Visual Studio (back in the win days) or Eclipse, it has all that I need, and even more: seamless version control systems integration, code debugging, etc. But I constantly had this feeling that there's something better out there. Once I had to work with LESS framework and I couldn't make NetBeans understand the mark-up. Then I've remembered how difficult it actually is to install a p...

Drupal is community based. Each little module, theme, issue, patch, debate, standard, approach, every single thing that connects to / plugs in / derives from Drupal is done by someone who's a member of the Drupal Community.

Even if you simply helped someone on IRC (freenode's #drupal channel) regarding Drupal, you can consider yourself a member of the community, a contributor (in a way or another).

Usually companies that work with Drupal, are the biggest contributors out there: they sponsor different events, they contribute fully polished modules, themes, features, they give sessions and trainings or offer office-space for those, etc.

Here, at Propeople Office, each Thursday, we organize free ad open Drupal Sessions. A Drupal Session is a small training-like event, where Drupal developers ...

I don't even know how detailed do I want to be, I'll do my best to be short.

Previous Thursday, while I was at work, I've received a phone call from a close friend - Alina. She asked me if I would like to participate with her and Alexei on the Startup Weekend. I honestly forgot about this event and now that we sort of had a team: me, Alina and Alexei - it really exciting and tempting to try and participate. Later that day, I've decided to actually participate and I've signed myself in the contest.

Same evening we had to meet somewhere in the downtown of Chisinau, and talk about ideas that we could pitch. As we were sitting in front of McDonalds, we summoned around 7-8 ideas: from task rabbit-like ideas to map-based rental search services.

Next day, at work, I did my best to pitch my ideas ...

Recently I've returned home (Moldova) all the way from California.

I've been in California for a business trip for a little more than 2 months. It was an awesome experience, not only in terms of work, but overall life-experience. I was on the same good-old Stanford GSB Project @ Propeople. As I've already worked on this project earlier, I knew all the people involved in it, all the technical details and all the business details - which made it comfortable place to work at. Another cool thing is that I already knew most of the Bay Area - which made my stay much more pleasant than previous one.

This time we had our own apartment, my own room and our car that we used to explore the Bay Area in details. I've seen much more places than previous times, I've even visited concerts of such bands as...

I just want to share my expectations and my excitement regarding the company that I work for - Propeople.

I probably should tell you a couple of things about Propeople. We are a company that develops website / web applications of a medium and large scale to some of the top companies/clients around the world. Right now we have offices in 7 countries (Moldova, USA, Denmark, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Sweden, Austria) and over 150+ people working for the company - now you can grasp the scale of Propeople. We are using lots of different tools to build products, but right now most important platform we are using is Drupal (what got me in the company in 1st place).

An important thing to understand (and I'm really happy about it) is that Propeople doesn't work according to simple Outsourcing principle - ...

This Friday was an exciting day for me, one more co-worker came all the way from Moldova to California.

Her name is Maia and she's an awesome themer that works with me for Propeople. We used to hang out often in Moldova and we get along well - that's why I was very happy about her arrival.

So these days, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, were days when we did our best to get Maia to know California, and we went to bunch of places that we didn't see ourselves. 3 guys and 2 girls - the Propeople crew.

So far we've been to the Castro street in Mountain View, went all the way down to Santa Cruz and walked on the boardwalk where we took a ride on a roller coaster, ate seafood at the pier with an awesome ocean view, went to Monterey and walk around its streets, been to San Francisco at night and had ...

Sunday! It was an awesome morning and an interesting event ahead - "Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs/Co-founders Mixer: Tea & Music".

I had a perfect mood for networking and ideas and I must say, the event was AWESOME :) We were one of the first people that came. It was a nice building with lots of cubicals inside and a big room filled with chairs and a stage.

In a couple of minutes lots of people came, and by lots I mean tens, and then it was over a hundred or even two.. We were quickly approached by some entrepreneurs that were looking for companies that could help them out in their ideas. There were also some foreign entrepreneurs who were offering different services - for instance there was a guy from Belarus which had a mobile development company, which is mostly developing products f...

After a couple of days of working and partying in the Bay Area, I've decided to actually go to one of the meetups (on this website) and meet new people, share my ideas and get inspired by their ideas.

So I just picked up first interesting meetup that I've found on the website: https://www.meetup.com/Silicon-Valley-Startup-Idea-to-IPO/events/54635562/

And later on, me and 3 of my co-workers joined the meetup (after work, of course))).

Anyway, once we've walked in the cafe, we've noticed a couple of tables which had the meetup name on them and a guy (the organizer) who was greeting people. You had to approach the table, pick a sticker, write your name down and stick it on yourself. Looked funny, but I found it extremely useful as I tend to forget people names very easy.

In a couple of minute...

Yes, I just had to use the exclamation mark! I've been building this blog for a while, with constant delays, vacation trips and work trips I've finally finished it. I've reached the point where I need a place to store and share all of my notes, tips, articles, ideas - and here we are, finally. I will write exclusively in English, but if you know any other languages such as Romanian, Russian or French - feel free to leave a comment or two. What will I write about? Most posts will be about professional experiences in the field of programming and software/site development, but I will also write about personal experiences as well. If you're interested, stay tuned for more. : champagne :