theory Posts

Platform.sh from scratch, part 0 - explaining Platform as simply as possible.

Hello, and welcome to "Platform.sh from Scratch". In this prologue to the series, I'll go over some of the very highest level concepts of Platform.sh so that you'll have a clearer understanding of what this product is and why it came to be.

Platform.sh is a "Platform as a Service", commonly referred to in this age of acronyms as a "PaaS". The platform that we provide is essentially a suite of development and hosting tools to make developing software applications a smoother end-to-end...

Building a drop down menu from scratch

Dropdown menus may seem like something that falls under the "solved problem" category, but they can be surprisingly tricky. Tutorials that you find online will usually walk you through a very simple example that assumes markup that you never have. This will not be that. We're going to talk about the theory behind building a drop down so that you can better reason your way through the mess of markup that you're given.

If you're working with Drupal and your requirements are outside the...

Explaining Non-Relational Databases To My Mom

I was on the phone with Mom yesterday, and we got to talking about technology - a thing that actually happens fairly frequently. Being an only kid, she's genuinely interested in everything that I do and it's been helpful to have someone who's mostly non-technical to bounce explanations off of when I'm getting my head around a new piece of gear.

The piece of gear that I was explaining the other day was something called Mongo DB. Mongo's parent company is called 10gen, and they landed on...