At Pantheon, we do our best to make building, launching and maintaining a Drupal or WordPress site as easy as possible. All sites on our platform get the same PHP and MySQL configurations tuned for their applications. Every site has Varnish sitting out front to provide speed and protection against surging traffic. Our Dev/Test/Live workflow helps ensure only quality code makes it to production. Multidev allows teams to work on new features in isolation. And database backups are very easy to move around between environments.

The way people use the phrase “technical debt” implies that good, tested code is debt free. If you are building a software service this is wrong; every line of custom code you maintain is debt.

To be competitive, software products must continually improve. All of the custom code you’ve written yesterday, rewritten today, and what you’ll write tomorrow -- you will be burdened with maintaining, forever.  To build competitive software you must balance this cost when you decide what code gets written, and what gets integrated from upstream.

When working on Drupal 8 theming, it is very helpful to have Twig debug mode on. Debug mode will cause twig to emit a lot of interesting information about which template generated each part of the page. The instructions for enabling debug mode can be found within the comments of the default.services.yml file, among other sources. In short, all you need is the following in your services.yml file:
 
parameters:
  twig.config:

I’m happy to announce the release of a supported Command Line Interface (CLI) for the Pantheon platform. It’s free, open-source, built on Drush, and available on GitHub:

https://github.com/pantheon-systems/terminus

In a nutshell, Terminus allows you to do anything you can in the Pantheon dashboard from a terminal:

One of our newer Enterprise customers recently migrated to Pantheon for a number of reasons; they were struggling with slow performance, downtime and lack of Drupal expertise from their existing vendor. One way we address these challenges is through our 30-day Launch Concierge process, available to all new Enterprise customers.

Before we can talk about why to use version control it's important to understand what version control is. In it's simplest form, version control is a system that tracks changes to files over time.

Version control is often used by software developers but is useful for anyone who works with files that are updated over time, especially if there are multiple collaborators.