Charlie Gordon and the notebook

This is a personal working notebook. It belongs to Charlie Gordon, a developer and writer who spends a lot of time with Drupal, automated testing, and the social side of open source projects.

The notes here are not product pages. They are attempts to explain a problem clearly enough that someone else can use the explanation. Some are tutorials. Some are field notes from events. Some are essays about the language communities use when they talk about good work.

What you will find

• Testing practice, especially the habits that make a suite readable and trustworthy.
• Content tool design: forms, filters, shared pages, and the small decisions that shape an editing experience.
• Community notes about newcomer paths, conferences, sponsorship, and youth participation.

How the notes are written

Each entry starts from a concrete situation: a form that is hard to finish, a test that fails for the wrong reason, a newcomer who cannot find the first task. The aim is to describe the situation, name the useful principle, and leave a method that can be repeated.

Where a claim depends on a source, the entry links to it. Where the notebook is uncertain, it says so. There are no invented statistics here, no badges, and no testimonials. The work is the record.

About the archive

The site is kept as a static archive. It loads quickly, has no trackers, and does not depend on a third party service to display a page. The Drupal contributor guide and the Google Open Source programme are two useful references for the community topics covered here, and the Open Source Guides are a good general companion.

Get in touch

Corrections and thoughtful questions are welcome through the contact form. If you are looking for commercial work, read the services note first.