Minor Drupal versions are usually for bug fixes, security updates, and the occasional new feature that doesn't break backwards compatibility. Compatibility changes are reserved for major Drupal releases. There are exceptions such as Drupal 6.2. It was such a big deal there is an update documentation page just for this release. When Drupal 7.14 made an API breaking change without providing documentation or notification to module developers I was quite surprised. The lack of detail made it difficult to track down the changes when I had a broken codebase. Here are the details so others can, hopefully, have an easier time if they run into this problem.

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One of the required classed for my engineering degree was an engineering ethics course. They said the reason this class was required was due to all the ethical failures engineers had been making. At the time I thought of people working on children's toys or military applications. An ethics course could be good to help them work through or realize any dilemmas they had going on. At that time I would never have imagined I would see more ethical failures working on the web than I did working for a military sub-contractor. Unfortunately, this has been the case.

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Minifying the JavaScript distributed to a browser is important for performance. The speedy module came into being in an effort to make this easy for Drupal sites to implement everywhere. Today the 1.0 release of the module comes out providing minified JavaScript for Drupal 7 core.

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Other developers are not like me. This is something I have to tell myself regularly. I'm reminded of this by the simple numbers for Wordpress usage. 16.3% of websites are powered by Wordpress and it accounts for 54% or the CMS market. While we can argue how these numbers are measured we can't argue that A LOT of websites are built on technology often railed on in tech blogs.

I find this even more interesting when it comes to creating development tools, documenting methods, and advocating use of the new hotness. All too often this happens in the bubble of people who think like us and do thinkings in a similar manner. We wonder why others struggle with what we are suggesting. We wonder why something isn't catching on. Sometimes we even write off these other developers as incompetent because they suggest using some piece of technology we've grown to despise. None the less, they keep trucking along, thinkings change slowly, some camps move further apart, and may good ideas go stale.

Part of the equation we often miss is that other developers are different and how those differences matter. They have different needs. Their customers have different needs. The list of tasks they have to do for their job is different. The priorities they have are different. Understanding these differences can help us make better all around products and move the Internet in a better direction in a healthier manner.

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One of the tips to speed up websites is it minify the JavaScript. It's simple, effective and the major players already do it (except Drupal). In the discussions for Drupal 8 and how we can speed up Drupal 7 we've been talking about how we go about providing minified JavaScript files for browsers and there are two camps. One camp wants to ship minified files and the other wants to minify on the fly. While minifying on the fly would be nice it turns out that this is really hard for Drupal and other CMS systems.

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