We are proud to announce the launch of the new Meyer Memorial Trust site! Built in Drupal 8, the site demonstrates a true local collaboration between Meyer Memorial Trust, design partner Smith & Connors and Metal Toad.
I've been going around town giving a talk on the history of women in computers. During my research, I came across so very many women I’d never heard of before, but who had made indelible marks on the history of computing. I decided to write a blog series about these amazing software pioneers who just happen to be women. But I didn’t just want the blogs to be boring old history lessons. Instead, I wanted to give examples and do research on the actual code these pioneers made.
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Sony
Golden Globes
When building out a web project in Symfony that needed CMS capabilities, we quickly turned to the excellent Sonata Admin Bundle. At it’s core, it provided us with a way to quickly generate an admin interface for all of the entities that need to be created and updated by site administrators.
We are excited to share that Oregon Business Magazine recently acknowledged Metal Toad, based on our application and employee survey, as one of the 2017 100 Best Companies to Work for in Oregon.
In the summer of 2016, I was asked to fill some big shoes. The product owner for the team supporting one of our biggest clients decided to move on, the client wasn't particularly happy, and the delivery team was facing a large and challenging backlog with a fast approaching deadline. I was asked to step in as the product owner/project manager/account manager all while continuing to lead the project management department. Sounds like a fun summer, right?
Metal Toad, I would like to congratulate you for one year of project management consistency, one year without turnover in the project management department. This is a cause for celebration! Raise your glass filled with the libation of your choice and high-five your neighbor. Leading this team and building this department fills me with pride when I reflect on 2016.
Any industry that wants to be sustainable must think long term. In the timber industry they need to worry about the future availability of trees, for fisheries they need to think about fish - you get the point. If any industry does not pay attention to replenishing the font of its raw materials, this is an industry that is setting itself up for major problems. Don't replant trees or don't allow fisheries time to replenish themselves and things are going to end badly.
Seen through this lens, the software industry is a slash-and-burn operation.
There is so much talk and there are so many articles posted of people showing gratitude for the welcome they received on their first day at a new company. Desks with brand new laptops or car keys – it’s honestly pretty cool. It is important that companies make new employees feel welcomed, particularly by presenting the tools they need to do their job. I also love that companies are trying to make a great first impression.
Metal Toad's second hackathon will be focused on the Internet of Things. Why IoT? Over the years we have accumulated broad experience in this area; we've built systems including analytics for solar and wind energy, backend services for wearable devices, and a vehicle telematics platform. Of course this is a growing field, and in addition to software and data analytics for IoT, this will be a chance for toads to get their hands dirty with a soldering iron.
If you were to go out and buy a new piece of furniture, would you prefer a store that offered a great product and treated you poorly or a store that provided a great shopping experience, but poorly made furniture? The answer is of course that you would want both a great experience and great furniture, yet too often in the service industry our love of our craft blinds us to what our customer experience truly is.
Data protection is one of the primary advantages of Drupal, but sometimes there are exceptions to the rule and you might need to modify a field to account for some change in business needs. There are a few rule bends (read hacks) that can be done to circumvent Drupal's checks and still maintain data integrity. You should only perform this when extending a field or changing something reasonable that is allowed by the database server. For example, expanding a varchar length or changing unformatted string into a formatted text field.
Metal Toad has and deep belief that apprenticeships in tech can hone new skills introduced in code school and provide real world experiences that can springboard people to a new career. Our founder Joaquin Lippincott has shared his beliefs about how anyone can learn to code and the concept of open source apprenticeships. Metal Toad started their Developer Apprenticeship program in 2015.
You know what’s sad to me?
It’s sad that most people will never know how liberating it is to come to terms with your unhappiness, and to quit your sh*tty job because of it.
My moment of clarity came on a bus.
