I haven't written here in a while, and I'm not going to make grand proclamations declaring that I'll be writing here regularly from now on. However, I did want to share a few notes on a few things going on in my life. Maybe I'll share updates on that going down the road: we'll see.

I started to realize about a year ago that I was experiencing burnout from the code contribution work I had been doing with Drupal. I hit a wall soon after DrupalCon New Orleans, where I had probably pushed myself too hard.

My four-year old daughter saw the moon outside Thursday morning, and she told me about how the moon goes around the Earth, and how the planets go around the sun, because we've been talking about that. Then she said that the sun doesn't move, and I replied, not quite.

In the darkness of 2016, the brightest light for me and many others has been Lin-Manuel Miranda's broadway hit, Hamilton. A multitude of musical styes mix with a compelling look at our nation's founding through the eyes of immigrant extraordinaire Alexander Hamilton. A diverse cast infuses a familiar story with a new look that shows how all of the threads of America's great tapestry are welcomed and valued and how yes, immigrants get the job done.

Over the last six months, the Drupal front-end community has had a lot of discussion about how to best use our theme system to work with design components. What would it mean to have a component-based theme system, and why does that matter?

With Drupal 8, we have several major improvements to our theme system.

Before you ask, yes, the image at the beginning of this post is a conductor, not a composer. The open source PHP package management Composer has a conductor as its official logo, and who am I to argue? An image of somebody scribbling away on sheet music may have been less compelling. A harmless sleight of hand.

As I work on more and more Drupal 8 sites, I am becoming convinced that given enough time, nearly all Drupal 8 sites will need to be managed with Composer. I think that's kind of a big deal.