The Beyond Blocks podcast
A podcast about Drupal, PHP, open-source, and related software development topics. Guests include people like Matt Glaman, Eirik Morland, Tim Lehnen, Ryan Szrama, Sam Mortenson and Jess Archer.
Episodes
Episode 27: Discussing Drupalisms with Emma Horrell and Luke McCormick
In this episode, Oliver is joined by two guests - Emma Horrell, User Experience Manager at the University of Edinburgh, and Luke McCormick to discuss Drupalisms and Drupal's terminology, the Drupalisms working group and the work being done in Drupal and Drupal CMS to de-jargon Drupal.
Episode 26: The Confident and open source sustainability with Mark Conroy
For the final Beyond Blocks episode of 2024, I caught up with Mark Conroy to discuss changes since we spoke in February; namely leaving Annertech and setting up The Confident - a digital agency focused on LocalGov Drupal, different ways to charge for development services and being sponsored to work on open source software.
Episode 25: Drush and Laravel Prompts with Jess Archer
In this episode, Oliver and Jess Archer (Engineering Team Lead at Laravel) discuss Laravel Prompts and Drush, PHP, Linux and working on the command line with tools like Neovim and tmux.
Episode 24: Generative AI in PHP with Chris Ballard
In this episode, Oliver is joined by Chris Ballard to discuss his recent talk at PHP South West about using generative AI in PHP, speaking at meetups and live coding.
Episode 23: Drupal Events, Conditions and Actions with Jürgen Haas
In this episode, Oliver is joined by Jürgen Haas to discuss the Drupal Event, Condition, Action (ECA) module.
Episode 22: Static Analysis with Dave Liddament
In this episode, Oliver is joined by Dave Liddament - Director at Lamp Bristol and Organiser of PHP South West - to discuss PHPStan and static analysis.
Episode 21: Violinist, Render Arrays and Feature Flags with Eirik Morland
Oliver is joined again by Eirik Morland (the first returning guest) to discuss recent improvements and enhancements to Violinist, such as Team support (a.k.a. multi-user subscriptions).
Episode 20: Bootcamps, Hackathons, Meetups and Drupal with George Gordon
In this episode, Oliver speaks with George Gordon - a graduate from the School of Code who was recently employed in their first Junior Developer role - about their move into tech and software development, their experiences at hack days and meetups, and their introduction to Drupal.
Episode 19: Single File Components and Static Drupal Websites with Sam Mortenson
In this episode, Oliver speaks with Sam Mortenson (samuelmortenson) about single file components in Drupal and Tome (a Drupal-based static website generator).
Episode 18: LEGO, robotics and open-source software with Andy Hoang
This week, Oliver is joined by Andy Hoang. They discuss teaching children to code with LEGO and robotics, and how to leverage open-source software.
Episode 17: Automation, Linux training and mechanical keyboards with Jochen Lillich
This week, Oliver is joined by the Monospace Mentor - Jochen Lillich.
Jochen and I discuss content creation, live streaming on Twitch and YouTube, infrastructure automation, Linux, mentoring and, of course, mechanical keyboards.
Episode 16: Health, fitness and weight loss with Simon Graham
This week, Oliver discusses health, fitness and weight loss with Personal Trainer and Weight Loss Coach, Simon Graham.
Episode 15: Domain-Driven Design with Rob Allen
This week, Oliver discusses Domain-Driven Design with PHP UK speaker, Rob Allen.
Episode 14: Diffy and Visual Regression Testing with Yuri Gerasymov
This week, Oliver discusses visual regression testing and Diffy with Yuri Gerasymov.
Episode 13: Centarro and Drupal Commerce with Ryan Szrama
This week, Oliver is joined by Ryan Szrama, CEO of Centarro, to discuss Drupal Commerce, Commerce Kickstart, Mario Kart and the dreaded cache_form table.
Episode 12: Docker with Nick Janetakis
This week, Oliver is joined by Nick Janetakis - a Software Developer, Docker Captain and Teacher who focuses on building and deploying web apps - to discuss Docker, content creation and more.
Episode 11: Build something useful in one day with Mark Conroy
This week, Oliver is joined by Mark Conroy - Director of Development at Annertech - to discuss all things front-end and how to build something useful in one day.
Episode 10: Twig, Symfony and SymfonyCasts with Ryan Weaver
This week, Oliver is joined by Ryan Weaver - Symfony Developer, Symfony core team member and Writer for SymfonyCasts to discuss the recent developments in Twig templates, SymfonyCasts, release cycles, and similarities between the Drupal and Symfony projects and communities.
Episode 9: The Drupal Association with Tim Lehnen
This week, Oliver is joined by Tim Lehnen - the CTO of the Drupal Association.
They discuss what is the Drupal Association is and does, how companies and individuals can contribute and support the Association, some recent and upcoming improvements to Drupal.org, Drupal 7's end-of-life, and more.
Episode 8: Violinist and automation with Eirik Morland
Oliver and Eirik Morland discuss automated dependency updates with Violinist, PHP and Composer, why automation is good, and focusing on providing value for clients and customers.
Episode 7: Testing Legacy with Mike Karthauser
Oliver and Mike discuss e-commerce, legacy code, technical debt, automated testing, test-driven development, refactoring, code vs. no-code solutions, and Mike's recent talk at PHP South West in Bristol.
Episode 6: TUIs, CLIs and open-source with Dan Leech
In this week's episode, Oliver is joined by Dan Leech to discuss building command-line applications and TUIs with PHP based on Dan's open-source projects - Phpactor, PHPBench and, most recently, PHP-TUI.
Episode 5: Managing technical debt with Dieter Blomme
Episode 4: A case study from Oxfam with Ed Crompton
Episode 3: Community engagement for non-technical Drupal enthusiasts with Niklas Franke
This week, Oliver is joined by Niklas Franke to discuss DrupalCon Lille, contributing to Drupal as a non-technical enthusiast, the Splash Awards and the Drupal community in Germany.
Episode 2: Drupal's Alternate Realities with Panagiotis Moutsopoulos
In this episode, Oliver is joined by Panagiotis Moutsopoulos to discuss about the whole first-time DrupalCon experience of Lille (France) and more specifically, his session Drupal’s Alternate Realities A BoF session presenting some history but mainly the different ways to tackle a problem in Drupal using different methodologies.
Episode 1: Retrofit with Matt Glaman
In this episode, Oliver is joined by Matt Glaman to discuss Retrofit. A tool that makes it easier to upgrade Drupal websites by allowing legacy Drupal code to run on any version of Drupal.