Koala

Git Merges Gone Wild: When Sass Compiler Settings Diverge

Here's one of those problems you can file away under the umbrella of DevOps problems nobody really wants to think about. In my case, I stumbled accross this problem while looking at two branches with respective SASS changes--although, this can logically happen with any code that needs to be compiled to an output file and has different standards for how to do that. Today I hit a merge conflict, and my merge tool was telling me that every line of local and remote were completely different. It turned out my coworker and I were compiling our SASS to different output standards; the end result was that my merge tool (GitKraken) crashed and I was effectively unable to see which lines of code had actually diverged. Here's how to stop this from happening to you!

Background: Git Merge Gone Awry

There's not a lot to this: my coworker has been working on her branch; I've been working on my own. The time has come for me to merge my branch into my coworker's. I checkout my coworker's branch to run a git merge and this is what happens: the _overrides.scss file merges successfully but the output files fail. Those output files are compiled by a little program I run called Koala--a SASS compiler.

SASS Compilers: When Your Drupal Theme Won't Update Even After Clearing Cache

Ever feel like you basically spend the entire day hitting your head against a wall? It happens to the best of us--particularly when it comes to elements of DevOps we don't deal with on a daily basis. I spent far longer than I care to admit today trying to assess why my Drupal site theme wasn't updating despite holding my code to a microscope, and despite any number of cache clears. The culprit: the output path on my SASS compiler was set to the wrong folder. Seems like a novice mistake... which is why I'm commemorating it with a blog post: sometimes brain farts are just part of the job.

Background: A New Computer

That's right... I got tired of lugging my laptop between home and the office, so I setup a new computer over at the coworking space. Okay, technically, it's not a new computer at all; it's a 2011 Mac Mini Server running Xubuntu 20.04--still a perfectly reasonable computer for web development in 2021. But, that means "provisioning" the computer for my workflow. Thanks to Git, this is a pretty easy task: install a LAMP stack, clone the repository, setup drush aliases, import a DB, and we're basically good to go...

Except, not really.

Raspberry Pi 4 -- Yes, You Can Use it for Web Development

It'll take a while for you to optimize your Pi 4, but the answer is a definitive "YES"--you can manage a development workflow on it. The real question is, do you want to?

Background

One of the big concerns with the Raspberry Pi 4 as a daily driver is, of course, whether the hardware can handle the comparable workload of a desktop computer. I've already touched lightly on overclocking the Pi and optimizing a boot disk. The final question is whether the little SBC actually has enough software support to be productive--in any effective sense.