Development Blogs

Pass it on.

When your work and life excite you, it’s hard to keep it to yourself. Our blog is just part of a larger discussion we’re having on Twitter, Facebook, and in communities all over the web.

Brian Walters

Symfony moved into version 4 last November. One of the best patterns embraced by the newest major version of this venerable framework is Autowiring — basically a term for Dependency Injection that uses PHP type-hinting. What is Dependency Injection? A fine place to start! To summarize Dependency Injection as simply as possible: When a class needs another class, the framework should provide it.

Lindsey Gates-Markel

It’s Wednesday afternoon at Pixo, and the Hall of Justice is getting restless. The #happy-hour Slack channel starts to light up as 4:45 ticks closer. Finally, it appears: It’s 4:45, and Marty, our recently appointed Director of Technology, has deemed it time for “a Marty.

Pixo

I was part of the first project team at Pixo that included pair programming as an explicit part of our team charter. The four of us dove into it. I remember how exciting it was reading up on the benefits and planning our own project space with all the right monitors and peripherals to make it work.

Brian Walters

This is a reply to How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016. Hey, I got this new web project, but to be honest I haven’t coded much web in a few years and I’ve heard the landscape changed a bit. You are the most up-to date web dev around here, right? Yeah.

Landi Najarro

Automating Plugin/Module Updates on Pantheon

"Obstacles are what you see only when you lose sight of your goals."

Landi Najarro

Developer

Landi joined the Pixo team as our Support Engineer Intern in 2013, as she was finishing up her computer engineering degree at the University of Illinois. As soon as she stepped off the graduation stage, Pixo snatched her up!

As a software engineer, Landi is an integral part of several teams and projects across Pixo. She spent years responsible for our extensive Technical Support and End User Help Desk. Now she uses her experience in support and accessibility to advocate for end users in the software she writes. Landi advises and tests for quality assurance and ensures project go-lives go smoothly. You’ll want her on your team for any static site, enterprise-level site, or connected engineering project that connects hardware and software.

Landi grew up in Chicago and trained in martial arts beginning at the age of 8. She used her training to teach martial arts to children with disabilities, which sparked her passion for accessibility.

She has been instrumental in outreach programs to get young women and underrepresented students interested in engineering (including volunteering at the Don Moyer Boys & Girls Club). Every other summer, she teaches robotics to high school girls at the Worldwide Youth in Science and Engineering (WYSE) camp, hosted by Women in Engineering at the U of I.

As Pixo’s reigning karaoke queen, Landi can slay a Beyonce run; as a Zumba enthusiast, you can find her leading a breathless group of Pixonauts every so often in our café. And if you’ve ever been to a Champaign Ladies Amateur Wrestling (CLAW) meet and wondered how the wrestlers fall so gracefully without getting injured… thank Landi.

EXPERTISE

JavaScript: Angular, React, React Native, Mocha & Chai, Nunjucks, Stylus

PHP: Symfony, Twig

Other languages: C, C# dotnet, C++, HTML/CSS, Assembler

Databases: MSSQL, PostgreSQL, CouchDB, Firebase

* Certified Scrum Master – 12/2020

EDUCATION

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – B.S. in Computer Engineering

EMPLOYMENT

Pixo – Support Engineer (2013-2017), Developer (2017-present)
University of Illinois Girls Adventure in Math, Engineering & Science, 2008-Present – Robotics Coordinator, Computer Science Coordinator, Lab Assistant, Counselor
University of Illinois Women in Engineering, 2013 – Office Support Associate
University of Illinois Micro & Nanotechnology Laboratory, 2010 – Curriculum Developer

Updating WordPress plugins and Drupal modules is a pain, but it can become unmanageable when you have dozens or hundreds of sites. Pixo has automated the process to apply all plugin and module updates on Pantheon sites with a simple command. In this post, we explain how to use this automation and we share the code.

Landi Najarro

Our new bookmarklet helps visualize design of ARIA landmarks

"Obstacles are what you see only when you lose sight of your goals."

Landi Najarro

Developer

Landi grew up in Chicago and trained in martial arts beginning at the age of 8. She used her training to teach martial arts to children with disabilities, which sparked her passion for accessibility.

EXPERTISE

JavaScript: Angular, React, React Native, Mocha & Chai, Nunjucks, Stylus

PHP: Symfony, Twig

Other languages: C, C# dotnet, C++, HTML/CSS, Assembler

Databases: MSSQL, PostgreSQL, CouchDB, Firebase

* Certified Scrum Master – 12/2020

EDUCATION

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – B.S. in Computer Engineering

EMPLOYMENT

In our previous accessibility post, Choosing ARIA Landmarks: Get Your Semantics Right, we discussed how blueprints can help our developers implement the proper ARIA structure for their sites and applications. One of these blueprints is an ARIA overlay, which groups content on the wireframe and labels them with ARIA landmarks that should be included to maximize accessibility for all users. The availability of landmarks allows users of assistive technology to use a keyboard shortcut to quickly navigate through the page.

Pixo

In a previous blog post, we explained Why We’re Decoupling Drupal. To learn more about how we decoupled one of our recent CMS projects, take a listen to “Content as a Service: What to know about decoupled CMS,” from our webinar with friends from Four Kitchens, on June 11th, 2015, hosted by Pantheon. Pixo’s portion of the recording starts at 21:00.

Cameron Macintosh

Everyone loves Pantheon hosting’s time-saving one-click updates for Drupal and WordPress. If you are putting a site onto Pantheon that already has revision history in Git, then you likely want to keep your history. But if you create a Pantheon site from an existing Git repo, one-click updates will not be available.

Brandon Bowersox-Johnson

If you’re about to embark on a CMS website project, now is the time to consider whether you might benefit from an approach that decouples your CMS from your website. In this post, we assess the pain points of tightly-coupled Drupal that led us to adopt a decoupled approach. Traditionally, building a Drupal site goes like this: Download and install Drupal.

Landi Najarro

The Cost of Waiting: Why Fix Accessibility From Day 1

"Obstacles are what you see only when you lose sight of your goals."

Landi Najarro

Developer

Landi grew up in Chicago and trained in martial arts beginning at the age of 8. She used her training to teach martial arts to children with disabilities, which sparked her passion for accessibility.

EXPERTISE

JavaScript: Angular, React, React Native, Mocha & Chai, Nunjucks, Stylus

PHP: Symfony, Twig

Other languages: C, C# dotnet, C++, HTML/CSS, Assembler

Databases: MSSQL, PostgreSQL, CouchDB, Firebase

* Certified Scrum Master – 12/2020

EDUCATION

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – B.S. in Computer Engineering

EMPLOYMENT

Test early, test often When projects follow a waterfall pattern, you might gather requirements, create design mockups, build the functionality, and finally test the results. During testing, Quality Assurance (QA) files bugs for rest of the team to fix errors that could have been solved much earlier on if there had been more collaboration throughout these ‘phases’. This is highly inefficient and can extend the lifetime of a project.

Pass it on.

Brian Walters

Lead Web Developer

EXPERTISE

EDUCATION

EMPLOYMENT

Lindsey Gates-Markel

Senior Content Strategist

EXPERTISE

EDUCATION

EMPLOYMENT

Brian Walters

Lead Web Developer

EXPERTISE

EDUCATION

EMPLOYMENT

Landi Najarro

Developer

EXPERTISE

EDUCATION

EMPLOYMENT

Landi Najarro

Developer

EXPERTISE

EDUCATION

EMPLOYMENT

Landi Najarro

Developer

EXPERTISE

EDUCATION

EMPLOYMENT

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