Author: dwayne

WordCamp Minneapolis: Hashtag confusion and so many familiar faces

WordCamp Minneapolis: Hashtag confusion and so many familiar faces

I make no secret that Minneapolis is one of my favorite cities in the world. In fact, other than my beloved San Francisco, it is the only place that even comes close to feeling like home anymore. This could be from the simple midwestern pleasantness, or the left leaning co-op believing local esthetics replete with vegan options and bike lanes all around, or the fact that I know so many people here. Likely it is a mixture of all those factors and more. It made it very enjoyable to return to the larger of the twin cities for WordCamp Minneapolis.

Food and Fun

TCDrupal

One of the amazing synchronicities I have experienced recently, the fact that the Twin Cities Drupal Happy Hour was taking place the first full evening I was in town. It was an absolute treat to reconnect with some of my Drupal family, many of whom I had not seen since Chicago or Baltimore. I was especially glad to see Tim Erickson, who is the direct inspiration for my ‘improv for developers’ talk and I was super glad to tell him my experiences delivering it in Paris. Really could not have done it without his input and support. I rarely drink beer but had a really solid american stout at Wild Mind Ales. It was an ideal way to pre-game for the rest of my weekend!

Speaker Dinner:

I left my Drupal kinfolk to go hang out with the #WPLife family at the Speaker/ Sponsor dinner to officially kick off WordCamp. We gathered at the Modern Tribe office which just so happens to share a patio with Norseman Distillery. Norseman provided us with some pretty amazing punches and made their entire amazing spirit menu available for purchase. I found their local grain based vodka mighty smooth, smoother than Tito’s though not nearly as available at your local market. I was even interviewed by podcaster and fellow speaker Rebekah Smith. Made a few new friends and got to play giant Jenga with some old friends while munching on some pretty good BBQ rice and beans. Chicken, pork, cornbread and mayo based slaw was also served. Sorry to say I didn’t write down where it was from. If I find out I will update this post. We didn’t stay out too late as Friday morning was starting early and this is a very busy camp, so we said our goodnights before it went too late.

Day 1:

Friday morning brought some pretty good conference coffee and tea with a selection of granola/snack bars. I was very glad to get some caffeine before the floor opened to the attendees, as there were a lot of them and it was an exceptionally busy morning at the booth.
Lunch was a taco buffet from Taco Cat and the line stretched out for a mile it seemed. At first I was very nervous I was going to go hungry and need to find food elsewhere. I was more than relieved when the lines died down rather quickly and there was a lot of food left. I ate way too many chips and amazing salsas and grilled veggie tacos. There was enough left over that we had surplus to pick at all afternoon, with all hot foods kept at proper temp with sterno.

Coffee Social

Day one concluded with a coffee social what had us playing board games and relaxing on a cloudy Minneapolis evening. There were donuts that spelled out WordCamp Minneapolis St. Paul. There was also crazy good cold brew coffee and infused teas from Quixotic Coffee. Given that day 2 of the event was going to be extra long and capped with an after party, the organizers made the very wise decision to have an earlier and more mellow event on the first day of the camp.

It turns out that the camp took place a block from one of the more veg friendly restaurants in the twin cities, Hard Times Cafe a really, divey place with no meat, no booze but sells tobacco. If you are in the area, check it out and get the THT (Tempeh, lettuce and tomato). The coffee is pretty awesome as well.

Day 2:

Day two started out with even more coffee and granola bars, but we also had left over donuts for extra energy!
Lunch was again tacos, but this time from Qdoba. The quality was on par with the previous day as were the leftovers. Missing was the mile long line as they catering folks set up early and we had at it as quick as sessions let out. Great job by the organizing team. It is rare I have been better supplied with sustenance at a WordCamp.

After Party

We were hosted at the the offices of Rocket55 for our after party. We had a very good selection of local beers and some yummy boxed wines to wash down falaffel and kabob wraps. Dessert was cinnamon pita strips with a frosting dipping sauce and chocolate syrup. I would never think to put cinnamon and sugar on pita before but ya know what, it works. I watched a valiant Super Mario Brothers attempt and played chutes and ladders, a game that teaches kids the random unfairness of the universe and takes much longer than it should for the most part.

WCKaraoke:

One of my favorite places in the world is Otter’s Saloon and we went there on a very too crowded but oh so fun night to sing together some WCKaraoke. I am always amazed by the talent and heart of our community. #WPLife is pretty sweet and put the icing on the cake of this camp.

Sessions

Day 1 Panel: Staying Sane In Tech

Rob Walling, Cory Miller, Ed Finkler, Sherry Walling

This camp took an interesting approach to Keynotes and had opening panels each day, focused on a couple different topics. The first day dealt with mental health. I only got to see about the first 20 minutes of this as I had a few other duties to attend, but what I saw was awesome. We need more open discussions about mental health and the real challenges we face in this industry. The more we can discuss this the better off and less isolated we will all be. Cory Miller once again shared his Iceberg method, which I first saw back at Raleigh, and I heard many folks talk about that throughout the rest of the event. Thanks to all our panelists for helping the community have this conversation.

WP-CLI – Save Time by Managing WordPress from the Command Line
Shawn Hooper

Oh boy I was excited to finally see this presentation live and to see the modern up to date version. Shawn is a crazy good presenter and I found every moment riveting. If you are a camp organizer reading this, invite this man to drop knowledge on your camp.

Minds BLOWN in the front row. One person had such a meaningful ‘ah-ha’ moment he actually shouted about it, to his embarrassment. But we were all feeling the same way with him in our awe of this tool, so it was a good shared experience.
Here are some of the things I learned in this ever evolving session and things I will for sure be incorporating in my talk:
explaination of the paramaters (what I have been calling flags) notation meanings
wp core verify-checksums (Check if core is hacked)
wp plugin search “any string” (searched the repo for keywords)
wp cap list (shows full list of capabilities list for a role)
wp cap role add/remove
wp cache flush
Do this demo in this order to blow more minds:
1 db export backup.sql
2 db site delete : show site gone
3 db import backup.sql
WOW
search-replace “Hello world” 🙂 🙂 🙂 (better deo than broken site IMHO)
Serialized arrays? Simple; it skips them, does not look.
search-replace “hello” “goodbye” –export=changed.sql – only changed in the exported DB
wp server (runs the dang WP included built-in php server!)
wp doctor (woah, didn’t know this was a thing, fixes some basic stuff reliably)
wp any-ipsum generate-posts

Cowboy Coding – Best Practices
Gary Kovar

I went into this session just to see what the heck he was going to saw and because Gary completely committed to the bit by wearing a cowboy hat the entire camp. You might know that working where I work I have a very strong bias against ‘just doing it on live’ and I had a fear that this would be a talk about not needing Dev or Test servers. I was quickly relieved when he explained that you really should not be doing this but there are times when you just can not avoid it. When you do hit these rare exceptions, you really have to go very slow and make sure on that site there is never going to be a reason to straight up cowboy code ever again. In fact, you could make the argument that if you are just going to direct change code or config on a live site it takes a lot of extra work and know how to do it right. Such as you must learn bash and learn it deeply to be abel to command line in. You must learn Vim, since you are likely going to be dropped into it on any random linux server. You must know tools like the wp-cli to be effective and make site wide changes. You have to know JS for doing any work on a modern website without blowing it up. I left feeling like every developer on earth should watch this walk. If you can avoid it, avoid it, otherwise go slow and get that site in version control ASAP.

Day 2 Panel: The Importance of Open Source

Aaron D. Campbell, Karim Marucchi, Lynn Winter, Mike Demo, Rian M. Kinney

Going to be honest here, I didn’t see this. But the conversations that spilled out of it were pretty great and on a subject that matters a lot to me, not just professionally. If we don’t actively keep the conversation going on the challenges and benefits of FOSS, there is a danger of it receding. Really though, I am only including this panel here so I can show the following tweet in context:

Configuration Management: WordPress Configuration in Code
Tessa Kriesel

Basically, stop overwriting your dang DB when pushing things to production. This used to be the only way to leverage a dev or stage server in a professional workflow, but the state of the art has advanced in the last few years. The best practice is to version control your configuration by moving DB config into code and pushing it forward. WP-CFM is a pretty solid plugin that does this for your WordPress sites. Don’t keep overwriting the DB, push the config via code FTW!

Lightning Talks

I absolutely love lightning talks. I was delighted to learnt hat there were multiple lightning talk tracks at this event giving me a chance to see almost double the normal number of talks. On a certain level, yes there is very limited time for these, 15 minutes total per talk, including Q&A. This gives the presenters a laser focus though and they get to their central point immediately. As you will see here, sometimes this does not equate to less overal material covered, just a faster delivery, which is awesome if you like drinking from a firehose.

Is your data dirty?

Jenna Totz

Not dirty as in adult X-rated. Dirty as in causes ecological damage. It is super important to consider carbon footprint! Every tweet you send gives off .02 grams of carbon. Each email produces 4 grams. Every search generates 8 grams into the atmosphere. I never really thought about each online action I take having that kind of direct impact and it was a bit startling. Especially since I use Google to find almost every page I land on, even if I know the URL. I will be reconsidering how I use search moving ahead.
There are several organizations that focus on helping people understand their carbon footprint from online use, such as the Green Web Foundation and tools like Ecograder.com from Mightybytes. Efficiency of web use directly is better energy policy.

Surviving a Crisis of Confidence
Nathan Ingram

Please take a minute to answer these 10 questions:
1. Are you ever worried people may find out you’re not really as capable as they think you are?
2. Do you sometimes feel pressure to know the answer to any professional question someone might ask you?
3. Is it hard for you to accept compliments about your work or accomplishments?
4. Do you secretly compare your abilities to those around you and feel like they’re better than you?
5. Do you ever feel like the reason things went well is because you were just in the right place at the right time or knew the right people?
6. Do you ever think that if you can do it, anybody can?
7. Do you agonize over even the smallest flaws in your work?
8. Do you become defensive when you are given constructive criticism because it makes you feel inept?
9. When you have success, do you privately feel like you’ve fooled them again?
10. Do you ever feel like you really have no clue what you’re doing and you’re afraid people will find out?

If you answered yes to any 3, there is a good chance that you are experiencing Imposter Syndrome. This is very real.
He used a very interesting escalator analogy.
We focus on the people ahead of us, forget there are poeple behind us
“Here is a secret, the people ahead of you have the SAME CRISIS of confidence that you have.”
We compare reality to other’s personas, especially at live events. Everyone puts your best foot forward at events, so don’t think ayone has issues.
Tips on how to escape it:
Remember: Nobody knows everything!
You know things that others do not and vice versa.
1. Be realistic
2. Be perceptive, everyone is good at something
3. Be Helpful We are all in this together! Reach out to those around you on the escalator. Become a prson who is good to know. helping others builds confidence. be humble!
https://nathaningram.com/wcmsp for all the slides and the full length presentation

Becoming a Community Builder: A WordPress Story
Raquel Landefeld

Sometimes you meet people in the community and it seems like they have been there forever. That they are in a position that you could never be in because you started too late and are not one of the ‘first movers’. I know I have felt that way many times in both the WP and Drupal spaces. I am very glad to have sessions like this one where Raquel discusses her path from ‘just someone’s wife’ to being the thought leader and community builder she is today. The short version is ‘be nice to everyone’ and ‘be sincere’ with what you are trying to do. This is a great one to show anyone new to the community.

So, You Want To Sell Online?
Zach Stepek

You have to make some big decisions to sell things online. Like what to sell. This is a deceptively hard decision. It boils down to why you are selling it: Passion or Profit? Not mutually exclusive, but mostly it is an either/or proposition for most people.
Once you have that sorted you need to find customers. Traditional marketing used to work, but now need more personal touch. Email marketing has slight bit of personal touch, but not enough. SEO is good overall but not a full marketing strategy, got to stand out. Pay Per Click used to be the gold mine, not now. Video is very powerful and getting cheaper to produce all the time. You want a Branded experience. Make sure your brand voice is evident in everything.

Embracing Page Builders
Tyler Golberg

Tyler made a really good case for page builders in the right situations. Yes, page speed might suffer and that is a serious drawback, but the convenience and time to delivery is the reason many poeple embrace them. Some people let their ego get in the way, meaning they feel it is cheating to use tools like Beaver Builder or the like. Sometimes these tools break and when it does, you are stuck in a world of short code hell. There are other considerable risks and less ability to customize specifics. But a slightly less tuned interface, if it is faster, is an OK trade off for him. I can’t say I disagree for a certain type of site.

Starting your first online business
AJ Morris

Tells the story of Liberty Jane Fashions
There is the version of their history on their site but the version that Aj tells is far more personal. It started as just a way for a mom to connect meaningfully with her daughter who had recently discovered the American Girl dolls. Her mother had shared a love of sewing with her and this was a meaningful for multiple generations, giving this a very emotional bond. At some point the clothing was noticed by other moms and a business was born. Every decision made after the first one to sell that first outfit was driven by the same passion to drive meaningful connections between mothers and daughters. The details of how it scaled were interesting but the underlying truth is you must be personally and passionately connected to your business if you have any hope of thriving.

What I learned raising 2 Million Dollars for Politicians–and How it Applies to the WordPress Community
Lindsey Miller

She started with the advice her first manager told her: “Preachers, pubs and politicians always pay up front!” Seems very sound advice to me. The rest of the talk was her sharing her experiences as a very successful fundraiser at a national level, based in Washington DC. It all comes down to personal connections. You must cultivate a genuine interest in people. Remember their names and details about their lives. Everyone loves this kind of acknowledgement. Ask questions and actually listen to their answers. You are trying to create connections. Only after you have made a real connection can you realistically make your case, asking them to do something, like give you money for a cause or invest in your business. Very solid advice that seems common sense, but was very well articulated.

My Session

Let’s learn Git. No more excuses
Man, I was hecka nervous about this. I read so many dang tutorials and docs in prep for this that at one point I lost perspective on how to structure it. Eventually I landed on going from first principals, meaning going forward with commits, backwards, then branching and ending up with working with repositories on machines that are not yours. I hesitate to use the term ‘remote’ after this talk because in fact everything is local to git. This is one of the harder concepts to a beginner and one of the things that makes Github/Git confusion so pronounced.
Here are the commands I covered:
git init
git status
git add
git commit
git log
git diff
git checkout
git revert
git reset
git branch
git merge
git remote
git push
git pull
git clone

Feel free to copy my slides for your own use.

I learned a TON doing this talk and am very grateful for all the feedback. I ended up going too fast a few times and after all my prep work to make all the demos animated gifs, I forgot to explain what people where seeing, instead explaining the theory behind the command while people where reading the slide. This failed. I now know better and next time will be way smoother.

Contributor day:
Well, there was one. But I felt rather ill, so I bailed right after it started. :/
Still:

Wrapping up

One of the best parts of this camp was seeing a ton of crossover from the Drupal community at this event. From the organizers who for sure are firmly footed in both communities, to the ‘first time attendees’ who I have known from Drupal for longer than I have been in WP space, it was delightful to see the family of PHP CMS coming together. Made for an extra special time.

I always feel at home in Minneapolis and this time confirmed that it really is my people. Midwest is the best, though the left coast is the most coast! I am not ready to move away from my SF any time soon, but glad there is somewhere that would not feel foreign if that day should come.
Super big thanks to Drew Adam and Tessa for making me feel extra at home in the the Pantheon Minneapolis offices while I was there.

Drupal GovCon 2017: Seeing the backdrop for The Walking Dead and reuniting with my Drupal family

I found myself in Bethesda, Maryland for the first time since I was a wee lad, when I visited the capitol to see my aunt who lived in the area. Bethesda is not properly Washington DC I was corrected on a couple occasions by Lyft drivers, but is instead a ‘chichi’, ‘foo foo’, ‘ritzy’ or ‘fancy’ little city next to DC. I will admit my hotel was recently renovated and kinda nice for the cheapest ‘in class’ place I could find. However you want to refer to it, I was glad to go and reunite with my Drupal family at Drupal GovCon 2017.

Held at the National Institute of Health’s Natcher Conference Center, we gathered on a Monday through Wednesday to partake in a discussion and celebration of Drupal 8 and the adoption of Drupal in government. This is an interesting intersection, as I saw in Iceland. I learned a lot. From Fibonacci sequence applied to project management to hilarious cat food content type issues, there was so much to take in. 3 days flew by, so let’s get to it.

Food and Fun

Sunday night I arrived and was fortunate enough to meet up with Kevin Thull. Kevin is the man responsible for a lot of the DupalCamps sessions being recorded. If you have any interest in helping with this project to make camp more accessible to all by puting high quality recordings online, please let him know. I had the extreme pleasure to be on the MidCamp team with him and was eager to catch up. While we did so, we caught a really good jazz/fusion/funk act at Villain and Saint. It was a low key and amazing way to kick off my first ever GovCon.

Day 1

I will say this, if you are going to go to the NIH on a Monday moring, expect that to take a bit of time. Both in terms of traffic and in terms of security lines. I recommend that you get a good breakfast first. After getting set up at the booth, I found coffee and got my busy day really going.
Lunch of day one was a bit of a letdown as I did not get any. I did my normal ‘wait till the line goes down’ routine but this time it backfired hard. Fortunately there is a pretty alright cafeteria there and belive it or not there was very little junk food. Sure some chips and there was soda, but most options were pretty darn healthy and they had an OK vegan lentil stew. Never thought I would say this, but good job NIH cafeteria staff. Well served.

After Party

The festivities for the whole camp community were at Brickside Food & Drink with an open bar right after the last session ended. To my delight they had falafel. I always love me some falafel. I even got to make a little speech as a co-sponsor of the party. I got to use the 45 seconds to thank the awesome community for giving us so much. I mean that. If it was not for the amazing open source communities I belong to I would not be doing this for a living. I don’t want to fathom that.

Afterward several of us ventured to get some True Food Kitchen and found our way to karaoke at the provoking of @DrupalKaraoke. So many good times.

Tuesday

Day 2 coffee was coffee. No more needs said on that. Lunch was better since I actually got served. It was a lentil based veggie burger with chips. A few too many pickles later I was happy to report back to the booth pretty full and rejuvenated.

Tuesday evening was an adventure. It involved meeting my team and some amazing people for a drink and pretty spectacular vegan food in DC proper at Smoke and Barrel. My ride there took a path that surely avoided all traffic by cutting through Rock Creek Park during the craziest cloudburst I can recall in years. There were even flash flood warnings on the emergency phone alerts of everyone at dinner.
Afterward I was super fortunate to see the Washington Monument. While I will always hear Jello Biafra’s description of it in my head, I gotta admit, it is a pretty spectacular thing to behold.

Meanwhile there was party on a boat from the fine folks at Taoti Creative!

Wednesday

Short day for me but coffee met me with the same potence as any other day and for the indifference I was grateful. I had signed up for lunch duty volunteering and glad I did. This gave me chance to eat a quick bite first and I again feasted on falafel from Moby Dick House of Kabob, but this time had dolmas and what was either guacamole or baba ghanoush a combo of the two and a tiny pile of hummus. There was kabob on the menu and salad and roasted veggies. The attendance the third day exceeded expectations as day one had overwhelmed supplies. I was glad to have seen this from the volunteer side and got to ponder it from an organizer perspective. While I am a bit miffed that not all options were available for all people in line, there is a silver lining that meant a lot of walk up registrations had occurred at this very large Drupal event. While no event is without its hitches, this supply/demand issue is one that we should all aspire to have though my hunger on day one would have me disagree.

table of indian and middle eastern foods with 2 long lines behind it

This was part 1 of a 3 part trip, so reality of airline schedules meant I had to depart before the last session adjourned and missed the (I am sure) awesome speaker/sponsor dinner. Alas, the United Club lounge and the beginnings of writing this post paled in comparison.

Sessions

Quick note before I dig in: This is a very large event, approximately one fourth the size of DrupalCon. This cause my attention to primarily reside at the booth. So many conversations, but this is not the place to reflect on those one on one interactions individually. In the broadest strokes I can say this is where I really learn the most at a camp. Every individual person I talk to has their very own set of particular circumstances which I have to absorb and consider before explaining if I think I can offer any assistance. Sometimes the answer is no. But more often than not I can at least point someone in the right direction for better answers. I am grateful to everyone who stopped by to say hi, not just at this event but at all of them. The only downside of this is that I did not get to attend too may sessions this time around, but happy to report on what I was lucky enough to see.

Keynote Day 1

Everything in DevOps
Michelle Krejci

I get to work with Michelle at Pantheon and it is a thrill to hear her talk about DevOps because she is so darn passionate about it. This talk was pretty spectacular and I highly recommend going and watching the recording.

Raw notes:
Storage silos and grain deliver
Her father was vice president of GEAPS
Insert the DevOps in the middle is what you would think
but the pipeline looks very different
everthing what goes on requires DevOps
in 2010 learned Drupal is scalable and safe
WH.gov deploying on Drupal
2011, features modles
2014 – mortonDK had no idea what DevOps meant
year to year perceptions of DevOps,
2012 about 1/3 was DevOps not worth it
in 2014 1% against
how to implement instead of if I should implement
94% adoption of Git
showing tools of what the industry ses, wants to highlight the problems that people were solving with those tools
2015 – Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
2016 – improved release cycles – tools took us to automation deploying an scale
presentations are about putting it all together
2017 – containers
DevOps track on it’s own
if just getting into industrial drupal you can get caught up
DevOps submissions account for almost half of submissions to many camps
infiltration of DevOps
Predicts the DevOps tracks will go away
everything and one is DevOps now
But the resistance is real! We can/will overcome.

Keynote Day 2

The Map is Not the Territory

Jeff Eaton

My notes for this…well, let’s just say had some issues and I am not going to write much of a summary. Go watch it yourself. I am going to boil it down to three tweets and a wikipedia link.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science

My Session

So you want to speak at a camp? Yes please! I have been thinking about this talk for a long while, as it is something that I have been talking to people about on a one on one basis for the better part of the last two years. I had originally written the abstract to submit as a lightning talk and submitted it to this camp since it was CMS agnostic. I was thrilled to give this talk and overwhelmed by the supportive feedback and people that explained I had given them a new perspective. Super grateful to share this knowledge with people and hope they share it with folks they encounter.
Like all the other talks I give I heavily borrow from google image searches, whcih lead me to this related article on imposter syndrome. While not the whole of the talk I do think this is the best take away from it: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/happy-trails/201511/feeling-fraud

Advanced Configuration Management in Drupal 8
Mike Potter

I knew this was going to be a good one when he started out with “Hi, I’m Mike and I have not touched the Features module in 3 months.” This is the chief maintainer of the old Features module btw. He spent the next 45 minutes with us explaining that D8 core configuration management was all you needed and walked through how to use it to best effect.

Raw notes follow:
Used to be push everything to PHP, which is a little weird, now it is yml
DOn’t push bad config, review what is about to be added and push to dev branch
In D8 can only import into the same SITE UUID
Clean install created a new random UUID
Config items have their own UUIDs creating new
config-import can create conflicts
Export and import
drush config-export

It’s Not You, It’s Your Ticket: Ticketing Lessons from your Apartment
Emilia Kubokirs

This was the first time I had the pleasure of hearing Emilia give a presentation and I hope it is not the last. Through very concrete examples of very familiar things she gave a wonderful strategy for communicating with a dev team in an effective and straightforward manner that leaves little room for doubts or ambiguity.

Raw notes follow:

This was the first time I had the pleasure f hearing Emilia give a presentation and I hope it is not the last. Through very concrete examples of very familiar things she gave a wonderful strategy for communicating with a dev team in an effective and straightforward mannor that leaves little room for doubts or ambiguity.

Raw notes follow:
Laundry analogy: step by step
as if explaining to small child
be detailed to elimiate all past assumptions in your brain
gets better results
Points!
Points are easier to determine then you have a clear understanding of the scope of the task
Time management hard, weighting things against each other easier, better for new kinds of tasks
Keystones
start with a common set of tasks that the team might encounter to be used as examples recommend using Fibonacci sequence as points (1,2, 3, 5, …)
Fruit example
grape 1, apple. 2 cantaloupe 3, watermelon 8
pitya???
facts you have them, but compared to apple in pic
make no assumptions
detail in requirements
might change points with scope creep
Let devs do their jobs!
Ticket example:
Build a page that lists each congressperson’s contact information
-The page should only be HTML/CSS
-each person should have a name, district, an image an email address
Each email should open a template directly
page should use a grid of 3 per row, one on mobile
text should be below the image with the format of name and district on the first line and email on the second
She then crowd sourced even more things to add!
“Heading off questions preemptively wil make a much better project results”

Imposter Syndrome BOF

One of the things I have become increasingly aware of over the last few years of my life is the devastating effects that Imposter Syndrome has on folks, especially in the open source community. I learned from Bridget Willard that 1 in 3 folks in our community likely suffer from some form of depression brought on by and exacerbated by the isolation working behind a monitor brings. I personally believe this fact is directly tied to the anxiety brought on by feeling like a ‘fraud’ or a ‘imposter’, because we never feel like we are good enough. I was very glad to have the change at GovCon to sit down with some of my peers and discuss this. After all I do really believe this is not something for any individual to confront and solve alone, but instead is a community issue that can only be dealt with by us coming together and dealing with it in the open, in the sunlight. We shared personal stories and I know I left feeling less isolated and knowing that I was not alone in feeling like I do sometimes.
If you are reading this, raise this issue with those around you. We all are at risk and we all need each other to get through it. Together we are better.
[https://events.drupal.org/baltimore2017/sessions/imposter-monologues-part-ii](https://events.drupal.org/baltimore2017/sessions/imposter-monologues-part-ii)

Day 3

Day three was a short one for me. Since I volunteered to help with the day 3 lunch and I had a 5:00pm flight I didn’t get to go to as many sessions as I would have liked, but I really got a lot out of the ones I saw.

Who dropped and made you the voice for all users! Miran Grujic#hiremiran

We forget to think and end up reacting to pressures from upper management or the ones with the loudest voices way too often. Lets take a deep breath and remember that users are great at finding problems with our products, apps, website, and so on but terrible at solving said problems. We will go over ways how user experience helps us plan for the unexpected and explain why certain things function the way they do. All of this will help us clearly communicate to stakeholders that our work is never done and the importance of iterating for a better experience and ROI.

Planning & Managing Migrations
Aimee Rae Degnan

There is a LOT of information in this presentation. Here are my raw scattered 1/2 make sense notes that I can not figure out how to organize better for the purpose of this blog.

Raw Notes:
You need to figure out if one pass or incremental,
likely both
need to know platform considerations, can’t just rewrite files on Pantheon or Acquia
Team specialists, don’t forget the data specialist!
Why not a bug tracker? A spreadsheet is easier, less to fight
going to have a lot fo data
Agile vs Waterfall, this is a case for waterfall
test, prep, move, test
Pre project education: It rakes as long as it takes
undefined new features are a risk to schedule
aggressive schedule causes own issues
Audit for migration
goals and features
DNS settings plug – don’t forget your TTL for the set, find who has control and confirm the settings and process, research early!!!
Architecting the new site: Got to set it up early, URL patterns planning
Every new entity is a new migration path (paragraphs)
you must archive everything before building
DO NOT let site builders just build without documenting
Migrate
Dev phase
go-live checklist
Don’t over engineer, Get Er Done!
max joins on a MyQL DB is 61
Pre-production migrations: keep running migrations
populate bulk of data
estimate duration to Go live
site testing and data audit
it adds up quick, many thousands of $$ if vary from the plan
GO LIVE!
final code freeze nd go-live checklist finish, DNS

https://twitter.com/nlucciola/status/892748526576431104 https://twitter.com/nlucciola/status/892763183794069504

Anatomy of a Page Request
charles.novick

Talk about your no-nonsense technical talks, this was the kind of talk everyone on earth should watch. 0% spin or marketing, this was a 100% factual account of what happens when you request a Drupal 8 page from your browser. I felt like I was back in college drinking from a firehose at an advanced lecture. It was done with poise and he showed grace when there was a technical issue with the presentation itself. I am not sure how the recording will turn out, but go read those slides! Here is the notes I could keep up with while wrapping my head around these core CS concepts:

Your full URL path determines everything!
What happened when you click?
the browser Call ISP, the ISP DNS looks up the caches first, browser or ISP cache
until you eventually get to the ip address xx.xxx.xxx.x
without a number nothing happens
D8 server operating system to apache to php to db and back out
PHP essentially executed scripts, Server do this right now!
index.php is the first place the server looks once we get to PHP execution
walk through the code, building and requesting kernel to do something
Symphony does the rest
autoload adds packages to Drupal kernel
created and has site directory, creates the site and loads into RAM
Drupal loads p content from DB (pages, users)
the URL is compared for aliases, Path module allows you to specify a custom URL for any internal system path
rendering is something on the browser end from what the PHP built (he talked fast)

Wrapping Up

It was a real joy to see my Drupal family in Bethesda for GovCon. I went in feeling a tad disconnected form the Drupal space as I have done 7 events with them this year out of 18 total, I find myself identifying first with the #WPLife side of it. It is always refreshing to be reminded I am part of the Drupal world and it is my imposter syndrome that keeps from remembering that. It also speaks to the quality of the Drupal community that it can always welcome you in such a great way. I really look forward to the next Drupal event, which might be BadCamp…

Drupal Viking https://twitter.com/drupalviking/status/892417244680134657

WordCamp Boston: Learning so much in Boston in the summertime

Last time I was in Boston, I was really in Cambridge for the most part. I returned for the second time this year for WordCamp Boston 2017 and got to see the nightlife in bean town proper. Once again this camp took place at the Boston University’s George Sherman Union, which features an amazing gigantic pipe organ! It was amazing to see my #WPLife family out there and meet so many new folks. I didn’t get to go to as many sessions this time around, but I stayed super busy at the camp and have so many thoughts. Let’s dig in.

Food and Fun

Friday night

If there is one thing you get used to at any WordCamp or DrupalCamp it is the tradition of the Speaker (and sometimes Sponsor) dinner. Typically the organizers invite the speakers to meet and greet one another. I always love this part because speakers, in general, are super busy during the event itself and this is the best chance to catch up or get to know them in the entire weekend.
Well, WCBos is a little different insofar as they still believe in this idea as you will read a little further down, but there were no pre set plans on Friday. This fact did not go unnoticed by some of the road dogs and we quickly made plans to check out Citizen Public House. Very glad we did, as they had a huge selection of fine spirits, a terrific menu and outstanding service as they gracefully handled an uncertain party size with people trickling in throughout our time there. If you find yourself anywhere near BU, check them out! It was fantastic to get together and catch up with those I knew and had the pleasure of meeting several new friends as well. Well fed and refreshed, we were officially ready for day 1 to begin.

Day one

The morning was met with the normal pastry, fruit, coffee catering you know and love. Well love is a strong term. I was thrilled when the GoDaddyPro crew pulled up with growlers full of iced coffee, which was tremendous. I didn’t get the name of the place they ordered from, but it was fine!
I was delightfully surprised by my vegan option at lunch. We had brown bags prepared for us and I, unsurprisingly, had a wrap of some kind. Surprisingly it was ‘meaty’ with thick eggplant slices and a generous amount of hummus and came with an oatmeal raisin cookie that satiated my sweet tooth, which had been triggered by all the donuts being offered that morning. Afternoon snack was ice cream and lemon sorbet.
Picture of a vegan wrap, a red aple and a half eaten cookie

After Party

Immediately after the final session, ending at 5:20, we migrated down the street a ways to the Brighton district and the White Horse Tavern for a very well attended after party. This local sports pub had a lovely patio and really friendly staff. There are some advantages and disadvantages to starting an after party immediately after a camp day. On the one hand it means your attendance is going to be much higher, as the stride of being together isn’t broken and the rest of your life hasn’t had the chance to seep in and distract you away. but I find it makes for a higher early attrition rate as folks need to go get a ‘real meal’ since hungry crowds tear through appetizers which only whet the appetites after burning so many calories swimming though so many bits of new information and conversations. It also means you don’t have any recovery period from the day. I, for one, get exhausted interacting with people and need little pockets of quiet and reflection to recharge. It does not mean I don’t enjoy people but it does mean that without a break I am noticeably more exhausted when my head hits the pillow and I find my mind less at peace as it churns through examination of the day. All in all this was a great, very well run party and I 100% applaud the organizers for making a very inclusive and well attended after party! I had a great time.

WCKaraoke!

“After the party, there’s the after party” – Remix to Ignition. I got to hear a spectacular version of this sung by one of the local regulars to our spot of choice for WCBos WCKaraoke party, Limelight Stage and Studios. While only beer/wine, this place had a full izakaya menu. There are many private studios you can rent out but we were there to use their main stage that night. This place was happening on a weekend night, but fortunately for us most of the people there to sing were in the private rooms which let 20some of us campers sort of take over the main stage area. I was delighted to read on twitter at one point that WordCamp Ottawa was not only having their own WCKaraoke party but actually where challenging us in Boston to ‘show them what we got”. Which of course we did!

Sunday Brunch

As I said above, the organizers believe in the speaker/sponsor get together fully, but they are unique in the WC world (as far as I know) with having a speaker brunch, with is logistically possible thanks to an 11:30 start time for the camp itself. We got together at Tavern in the Square for a delightful brunch buffet. I ate way too many waffle fries and not nearly enough fruit. There is no lunch on day 2 so I figured that was a good idea at the time. The iced coffee they served up was tremendous. Next time I am near there, I am going just for that. Full and caffeinated we headed to the venue to. . . .

Sessions

Keynote:

Design and inclusion John Maeda

This talk immediately took an unexpected format, as it was not your typical “here are slides about a thing” setup. Instead he asked folks to find the red slips of paper that were distributed and write down their fears. Then he collected them and directly addressed them. His logic: “To talk about the future you must address the fears.” While I don’t think he, or any one person, has the full answer to many of these concerns, he gave everyone in that room a jumping off point to articulate our fears and begin a communal dialogue about our future overcoming them. I was very glad to be a part of that room. I will put my raw notes below this paragraph, which you will see are a tad disjointed as the topics changed rather rapidly. Highly recommend watching this when it gets on WordPress.tv.

PHP based, not the new kid on the block, but still solid and massive use First exposure to the community? Fears of not knowing what up, inclusion If someone tells you Open SOurce like WP is not secure, remind them that all systems have vulnerabilities we just DON’T KNOW! Facebook does not disclose their flaws for example Many older people use all upper case since it is more legible, not all old people are yelling at you. Lose new users with changes like Gutenberg Resistance means somebody cares it means people care when you meet it, get excited things are moving fast, don’t be afraid of that, be afraid it it moving too slow the way we age is not the way the world really works things speed up, not slow down

Plugins panel:

Adam W. Warner, Christian Nolen, Lisa B Snyder, Lauren Jeffcoat

Of of the things I really appreciate about this camp is the panel discussions. Rather than have speakers with prepared statements and slides, we have thought leaders and a moderator answering questions around a specific topic. In this case we got to hear very good questions, both pre prepared and sourced from the audience, about plugins. Some questions of note: What is the safest way to update plugins? How to get the last % of way there for projects? How do I go from stage to live? How to determine what is a ‘good’ plugin, how do you evaluate? What are your favorite plugins.
It turns out the answer to almost all of these begins with the phrase “it depends” since the topic of plugins covers such a wide swath. This is a great one to watch at home when it gets uploaded.

My session

Open source panel Dwayne McDaniel, Jared Novack, Mel Choyce, Steven Word

I was very fortunate to be invited to moderate the open source panel at the event. When I was told I would be moderating, something I had volunteered to do if needed, I was not given too specific instructions on how to structure the panel or what topics around Open Source would be suggested. Given this opportunity I steered the conversation to 3 main areas. 1) What is Free and Open Source Software and why does that matter 2) How each person has contributed and how anyone can contribute and 3) what does the future of Open Source mean for WordPress. I feel pretty strongly about FOSS and I was thrilled to hear this passion from my fellow panelist as well. The biggest thing I wanted people to understand is that the community is that makes open source technology possible and it is up to each and everyone who is in the community to keep that community growing and vibrant. Without that, open source is just a pile of text files you can go look at.
Unfortunately I can find no pictures of this panel at this time.

Day 2
Keynote:

Democratizing Software

K.Adam White

I was excited to see this man’s name as the day 2 keynote presenter. Even though I have gotten to hear a number of his talks over the years every time I learn something new or find a new perspective. This was no exception and I left feeling inspired.
He talked about the reality that while anyone theoretically can code, not everyone gets the opportunity to code. Starting from there, he took us down a road of how those that have the opportunity to go this route learn as they go. I found it really interesting to hear his explanation that PHP, which stands for Pretty HTML according to him, is mostly learned through HTML and sort of in a backwards way in WordPress. This stumbling into it does not work for any other language like JavaScript, which is why that seems as hard as it does to most people starting out.
He also touched on the importance of a highly skilled and specialized community acting as a backbone to allow every person to develop their own niche, further strengthening the whole body when collaborating.
The best line from the whole talk I think though is “WordPress is for learners”. WP become a learning community. That is what we are even doing going to camps, either learning new skills or sharing the knowledge that we have with others. I am very grateful to be part of such a vibrant, supporting culture.

Contributor Day

I am working on a separate blog post about this. Will link here when it is posted.

Freelancing Panel

Amanda Giles, Jennifer Nickerson, Kyle Maurer, Adam Silver

I always enjoy these panels. Not a lot to say as the questions varied wildly as the answers. Go check it out when up on wordpress.tv. Here are some tweets about it though.

CSS Grids are here

Juan Pablo Gomez

I am always quick to admit that design is not my strong suit and something I know very little about. I still hold the first part of that to be true (as evidenced by this site’s layout [twentysixteen FTW!], but the second half of that becomes less true every single time I go to a camp thanks to amazing presentations like this one. He started us off with a quick history of design tooling, starting with raw HTML, going through Flash and Responsive design and added a few critiques of the resulting world. He holds a premise that as we have simplified for accommodating ‘all‘ devices, we got too simple and all sites started to once again look too much alike. But now, here in the present and looking into the future, we have grids.
Firefox was the first to embrace this standard and all the others, even Microsoft’s Edge, have since followed.
At it’s core it sets to achieve the goals that Responsive introduced. Which I am going to oversimplify as ‘have the browser do the math’. This is seen in things like the use of ‘fr’ or fractions to set column and rows dimensions, template elements, implicit and explicit mixed use of elements and repeat built in. He also took care to thank the thought leaders that pushed this standard and made his work possible, like Jenn Simmons. The Q&A was delightful. If you are even the slightest bit curious about CSS Grid, this is the intro talk for you.

Automating WordPress Updates With Visual Regression

Andrew Taylor

You know what robots are really, really good at? Repetitive tasks. You know what repetitive task is really boring and tedious but the entire security of the internet depends on? Updates. Let’s make the robots do the work.
The short version, which Andrew has spelled out in detail in his blog and github example repo is this:
wp-cli update plugin/theme –all is awesome but dangerous. Doing it in a staging environment is really good path, but manually testing gets monotonous, neglected and frankly impossible at scale. Continuous Integration services can be set up with testing tools to test every page, every time when doing updates. Further, it can report and automate emails to you and clients who you are charging update maintenance fees. It is a win-win, since they get frequent updates, you get far less manual effort required and there is a ton of safety built into the process to never take down a live site with a update ever again!

Happiness Bar

I looked back through my notes (Thank you to github for making that so simple btw) for any mention of happiness bar and I realized that I have never written about what goes on at these things.
For those who have never been to a WordCamp, there is a designated table or space for volunteers to basically hold open office hours for any and all WordPress related questions. And when I say any and all, I mean it quite literally.
At one point two of us were diving into a javascript issue with a single asset load malfunctioning on the most recent Chrome update. For a good 20 minutes we dug and dug. Finally we made some suggestions of solving this but they left with the issue still affecting live traffic. I was overjoyed the next day to have the person find me to report that one of the solutions we suggested had been implemented and the issue was solved! There is nothing quite like that feeling of “we fixed this together”!
Other questions ranged from HTTPS issues, design suggestions and plugin related discussions. As quite often happens with any technical discussions I was introduced to several bits of software for the first time and got to spread my love of the WP-CLI and LastPass (well password managers in general but that is my go to). You meet folks from all walks of life and stages of their WordPress learning curve. While it is awesome to know the answers to certain questions from memory I absolutely love having to look up information and show people how I got to the solution. No one knows everything, but Google knows where to find any bit of technical knowledge if you learn how to ask.
If you are going to WordCamps and want to get in on this action, definitely reach out to the organizers and let them know. This is such a vital part of what makes WordCamps special.

Contributor Day

I am working on a separate blog post about this. Will link here when it is posted.

Wrapping Up

While I am awaiting the Gutenberg to harden a bit more I decided to start using the markdown language editor, if you see something weird (other than my spelling and grammar) please let me know.

This was my 16th conference in 2017. Not a significant number in and of itself. I have 10 more trips booked at the moment and likely will have 3 to 5 more added on to make me hit or get really close to my arbitrary goal fo 30 for the year. So this trip was the 53.3% mark on that path.
So much has changed since the last time I was in Boston for this event, not just in the world and state of the Word, but in me as well. I often think of the words of Sean Tierney from back at Pressnomics Paraphrasing – “People come and go like seasons and you don’t always know wYou can never be mad at summer for passing though.”
I have gotten to bask in the glow of so many bright and warm individuals in the course of my adventures and I hold each memory dear. I do get a longing feeling sometimes when I think about the fact that I only see certain people so few times a year and some people I might never see again. I can’t say thank you enough for being part of my journey. It has made every step of it worth it.

I seriously am looking forward to my next chance to visit the old city and find myself in the silicon valley of the east again. Hopefully sooner than later. At worst, it will be for WordCamp Boston 2018!

WPCampus 2017 – Good times in Buffalo and fireworks at the Falls

After a couple weekends home in my beloved SF, I was very happy to get to attend my second WPCampus event of the year, this time in Buffalo NY at the lovely Canisius College campus. You might recall back in January I attended WPCampus Online from the comfort of the Pantheon HQ. While the sessions were on par with the live event, it lacked a few things that make a camp a camp. Namely the hallway track, the dinners, after hours conversations with my #WPLife family and of course #WCKaraoke. I was very, very glad to get to see my higher ed focused kinfolk and share in the joy at WPCampus 2017!

Food and Fun

WPCampus Welcome Party

Flying in overnight, I didn’t get as much sleep, but I was overly excited to hear stories from the field, have a lot of meaningful discussions and learn so darn much over these ~2 days that it didn’t slow me down at all. I was very glad to join my fellow WPCampusers at the local watering hole near the canal, Lagerhaus 95. We were met with the official Buffalo food, Buffalo Chicken Wings. I didn’t have any, but the pretzels and fries I stuck to for appetizers where pretty good.

It always warms my heart to see the awkward start of strangers introducing themselves gives way to camaraderie and new friendships. We capped the night with my new favorite ultra smooth vodka, Aylesbury Duck at the pretty hip Ballyhoo with those of us too wired up to just go home and sleep yet. Still, day one of the show was going to start early, so we didn’t stay out too late.

I was very, very lucky that I just happened to be in town at the same time Ghostface Killah was playing a $5 show with Slick Rick opening up.  I missed Slick Rick 🙁 but I did get to rock out with a member of Wu-Tang!  I couldn’t get too close to the stage but the crowd was awesome.  It was awesome!

Ghostface Killah on stage with a large crowd in the foreground
Ghostface Killah on stage!!!!!
Friday

Breakfast was your normal assortment of pastries and fruit with coffee and tea. Lunch was a serious step up though, even though we had to walk about a block away to another building on campus. We were treated to several food stations in the cafeteria, including fresh made sandwiches, wings, salads, tostadas, a few Chinese dishes and excitingly for me vegan mac and cheese and seitan enchiladas. Lines where a tad longer than anyone would have liked but the quality was pretty good.

Tray of sausages half empty tray of buffalo wings

The organizers kept us well fed in the mid afternoon with a snack break featuring a popcorn bar, which of course had a buffalo flavor option.

For Dinner we were left to our own devices and a small gathering of us met up at a local sports bar for some local delicacies. I like sports bars for larger informal dinners. They are used to a ruckus and don’t mind when a party gets a little loud, which WP people can be at times, as we get excited when hanging out together. I even got to meet and have my picture taken with the Molson Blue Bear!

Me and Demo from BoldGrid with the Molson bear

Afterwards a few of us took advantage of the geological proximity to Niagara Falls and went to see the summer fireworks over the Falls. There is a good reason this is an internationally known destination as pictures do not do justice to the spectacle. Truly a natural wonder. The Canadians that went had never seen the US side before and all thought it was adequate, but suggested that I eventually make it over the border to see their view. If only I had brought my passport.

 

Friday

Breakfast was a repeat of the first day. I was extra thankful for the coffee as my lack of sleep as result of my travel plus the time difference had caught up with me a bit. Again we traveled to the cafeteria for lunch and this time all the line issues were gone, though the trade off was that the feed as all pre-prepared wraps and sandwiches with chips and salads. Again they had a very good vegan option with a “chick’n salad” wrap that was quite filling. I actually ended up skipping the afternoon snack as a result. For that they served cheerio marshmallow squares, yogurt and fruit for that.

After Party

Saturday night brought the After Party. We gathered at The Expo, a large hall with several food vendors and a brewcade. I got there just as they put out our catered food, which was very heavy on the vegan options. I really appreciated this as it meant I could lay down a substantial layer of pot stickers, sweet potato salad and veggie wraps before I cashed in my drink tickets.
The organizers of WPCampus are also big fans of the WCKaraoke movement and we had a karaoke dj awaiting us, cranking up the tunes around 8:00pm and kicking things off with a very fun rendition of “Wrecking Ball”. After he went, I was super delighted to hear my fellow WPCampusers go in turn and blow the roof off the place. Some of the party enjoyed the corn hole (‘corn toss’ I also heard it called that night) and foosball tables by the bar. All in all, this was one of the better overall parties of the WordPress world and so many good memories were made. All to soon the clock struck midnight and we had to evacuate the place bringing an official end to the official activities of the camp. Really looking forward to next year already!

The Sessions

Opening remarks

My Session

Every project is a story: Applying storytelling to your client interactions

I was very honored to be invited to speak on one of my favorite topics, storytelling. I was also flattered that I was given first session slot of the whole event. This is often the most attended set of sessions of a camp. We livestreamed the event for those around the world that couldn’t make the trip and my video of this will be added to the page linked here, though I don’t know when exactly.

The biggest challenges of this particular time giving this talk were a) I had to stand relatively still as I was on a video capture so folks could see my face while presenting. And b) I had moved a few slides around in preparation of the talk thinking I might get a better overall flow, but only throwing me off when I presented. Still, I had very good reception. I am always thrilled when people comment that they see immediate applicability to their work. Storytelling applies to just so many facets of our lives that this is my current favorite talk I am submitting and am grateful to all the folks who have participated in the sessions and given me some great feedback.

 

A survey of WordPress online learning plugins
Chris Lema

I make no secret that Chris is one of my favorite speakers and I was not disappointed with this talk on a topic which I knew almost nothing about going in. Chris believes there has never been a better time for this or any web tech. Never been cheaper or more available. But implementing any learning system requires certain considerations both on a technical level and on a human level. For example he reminded us that people need encouragement. That often comes in the form of certificates. We need to think about how to deliver timely rewards to give people that little chemical release that spurns them on to get to the next learning opportunity.

The heart of his talk though were a set of slides that very eloquently showed the differences between the popular plugins. Rather than try to recreate those, just go look at his slides

He finished up with a top 10 list, which I love because those translate well to a blog format:
Ten mistakes not to make:
1 Don’t forget to capture course AND cohort metrics (mixPanel can help with this)
2 Performance metrics – get them, is it working?
3 Capture project (cost) metrics
4 Don’t forget that you have multiple stakeholders
5 Integrate metrics with email notifications
6 Don’t forget everyone is using their phones all the time
7 Everyone is being interrupted all the time (James patterson effect)
8 Short videos are cheaper to produce and easier to consume, (shorter better)
9 Everyone needs encouragement and motivation
10 Don’t forget to test everything, NOT just your content.

 

I do(n’t) belong here
Ashley Kolodziej

This was a talk on a very important concept that needs to be brought up constantly as we all fall victim to it, namely Imposter Syndrome. I have heard a number of such talks and this was a very good one. She addressed a few key issues such as the fact that millennials are known for getting participation trophies for everything, but this false praise makes us mistrust all compliments.

Also feeling like you can’t get anything right and struggling, but then you get a great job review, which is hard to accept since we see it as false praise. And then there is the notion that we just got lucky, blaming any success on external factors beyond our control instead of recognizing our own contributions. I know I identified with her point of succeeding initially only because of over preparation, which you can’t keep up forever. This makes you feel like you don’t belong, even when you are a great fit and excelling. She actually said something I hear in head more than I like to admit, a feeling that she has nothing to contribute to our space because “i’m not a developer”, which she attributes to the nagging feeling that others know way more than us and therefore we are not as good. She finished with a call for action for us to openly talk about this stuff and said “solving this is really a group effort”. I am grateful for her talk and am looking forward to continuing the conversation with my peers to help them and myself get over the terror of IS.

WordPress high performance hosting
Guillaume Molter

The short version is that you CAN do this on your own, but know it is complex. You are going to need more than a few tools and need to manage them all. Anyone can get their hands on these open source tools and spend the time and mental efforts to do this.

Personally I think there are better ways to spend you time than managing the tools of a deployment pipeline plus a stack with multiple cache levels on AWS, but I am a tad biased.

Overall a fantastic talk and Guillaume is a really good presenter. If you are at all curious what it takes to professionally manage WordPress at scale, I would highly recommend adding a vid of this talk to your research.

Interview like a journalist, write like a marketer: Telling stories with heart…and accuracy
Donna Talarico

The final talk of day one was from a speaker I was very excited to see. Her workshop on storytelling for better school websites at the previous year’s event had given me the wherewithal to formulate my own talk on storytelling. I was eager to hear what ideas she was bringing that I might be able to borrow from this year.

Interviewing is one of those skills I had not really thought a lot about, even though I read and listen to interviews almost every day.
Here are my mostly raw notes:
Don’t make your subjects sound like robots, let these interviews be conversational and natural.
Go offline for research sources, not all the best stories are (already) online.
Don’t be afraid to go the distance. Do what it takes to get the data to make it a meaningful interview.
Think about in person interview. How you condut the interview might need to be altered to make them comfortable and relaxed. Meet them on their terms.
Build Trust. Don’t launch into questions without just chatting and getting them comfortable with you. Makes for a much better experience and improved results.
Observe your subject. Take in their surroundings. Pay attention to little details from the environment.
Don’t prepare too many questions, let the interview be a conversation
Open ended questions, not yes/no questions
lead them to tell you stories. People love telling stories and you will get all you need from these most of the time.
Ask follow up questions. Not only to show you are listening, but this will help your reader later when we get an explanation of any unclear concepts directly from the interview subject.
Listen carefully!
Think about your body language. We say a lot when we react positively or negatively to information and that might skew the process.
Be quiet, give them room to think and formulate their thoughts
Be humble
Be open
Bring what you need, and bring what you don’t need, better to be over prepared for the unexpected than to be caught flat footed. Backup recording equipment or your own chairs for an outside meeting are examples.
Get your subject’s phone number just in case. If something comes up this will greatly simplify making other arrangements.
Record the conversation as well as writing your notes.
Prepare for the weather. Maybe plastic bags for your gear if you are going to be outside at all, especially in monsoon season.
If you are coming with a team, hide all internal woes, just be professional
If you are going to do a video, make the proper considerations, such as lighting and, as we learned from that famous professor learned when talking to the BBC, lock the door.
Email interviews are not good. Impersonal and lazy.
Surveys are OK with email but too many things and you will lose information. Also people write different than they talk. For example it is very common to write NYC to save time, but no ones says “NYC” to mean “New York” (or “The City” if you are local).
People don’t talk in bulleted lists
You want warmth in your stories, emails are the worst for this
When you are writing the final content, write first from memory, then dig into your notes. You remember the important parts and capturing those while still fresh serves everyone well.

Day 2
Code reviews: People use it, so it must be fine
Ronnie Burt and Joe Fusco

The team from CampusPress shared with us some of their challenges and how they were leveraging tools to overcome them. When they first audited all the sites they were managing, they found a whopping 38% of sites were ‘bad’, meaning there were significant issues with the theme, plugins or other factors. The talk delved into the tooling they used to fix this. It all boils down to one important fact though, you have to fully consider all the ways your code will impact a site before committing it.
First though they busted some common myths they think lead them to the situation in the first place.
Myth 1) Paid is better than free. Can be true but paying for support does not mean that the product itself is actually a beter fit for your needs.
Myth 2) New products are always better than old ones.
Myth 3) The number of downloads equals quality.
Importanly, no matter what themes, plugins or other tools you go with, you have got to test this stuff out. Without proer testing you are asking for long term issues.
Design plays a large part of this as well. It is not easy to support sites with annoying menus, lot of ads or overlapping plugins.
They reccomended a lot of tools for Performance testing, including my personal favorite, New Relic. Others included P3 PLugin, StatsD WP Client, xdebug, AWS Cloudwatch Logs.
They were very proud to talk about their own Campuspress code check plugin which they are making freely available. Custom build for their needs they have released it into the wild and are making all sorts of improvements now to make it better and more widely useful. So glad when companies give back.
For them, using Git and Bitbucket with the code check plugin to test locally before ever thiking of making a pull request is key to their success.
There were a ton of little suggestions as well, making this a must watch session when uploaded if you are at all committing code to a website.

A look at the modern WordPress server stack
Carl Alexander

Carl is one of my favorite presenters. Self described ‘oddball of WordPress’ he brings a very wide breadth of development know how to our space. This talk was a great example of the importance of looking at the basics to make sure we are efficient with our time as developers. I am just going to list out my raw notes of the highlights, but go see his slides for much better effect.
Used to be simple LAMP and you had afast WP site
Good old days
Now everything wants to load a lot faster
HTML always leads first responce
Nginx FTW! Built for traffic. Less config needed
you want to hit PHP as little as possible
PHP is a bottleneck. It is just slow to execute compaired to anything else needed for a site.
Cache as much as possible HTTP responses
three ways to do this.
Easy- plugin
middle level difficulty – on server caching (good to handle ddos)
hard (but the most customizable and might get you the best results): Varnish

Thankfully @ebarney took very good notes via twitter. You can find the string here:

A technical plan for success: Preparing to optimize 4,000+ sites at NYU
Daniel Cunsolo

Test everything (a recurring theme in many technical talks recently),
Automate the testing process to reduce human error as much as possible.
We warned of WP-options table bloat – things being stored in there can be crazy. This leads to autoloading entire giant files stored in there incorrectly.

A four-step guide on how to succeed at practically anything
Lori Packer

Of all the presentations I got to see, I went on the biggest emotional journey with this one. Lori is a terrific speaker and used great imagery in ger slides. She at one point shared a video that had me tearing up with all the feels. Pause and go watch that.
I also nearly fell out of my chair laughing at some of the things she shared, like how the TSA instagram account is using humor to make rather ‘meh’ material ‘marvelous’. That ‘meh to marvelous’ idea really struck a chord with me. I don’t think I am going to be able to ever write an informational doc the same way again.
Rather than me butcher her eloquence by describing her talk, go look at the slides and watch the video once available.

On the move: Website migrations debunked
Jonathan Perlman

This is a great example of a talk that could be easily turned into a training for any agency or organization on the planet. Jonathan laid out the realities and many considerations of migrations. There are a lot of tools to use and a lot of ways to approach this but the fundamental concepts are common under them all. This process is gonna take a lot of tools. A lot of them.
You could do this with GUI based tools but things will move a lot faster using command line. In fact when dealing with a large DB command line tools for MySQL might be your only option. He walked through the process and went a bit faster than I had time to  fully take notes on. Again, I am going to refer you out to his slides for a better picture of what this was all about.

If you are a newer dev reading this, the talk is a MUST WATCH and something I wished I would have seen a long while back. This stuff is complex, but at least the way Jonathan laid it out makes it seem very straightforward.

 

Wrapping up

My excitement at the beginning was equally matched with the sorrow of seeing the event end. The main reasons I like this event are not the fun times or even the sessions where I am learning all I am learning. They are the sense of togetherness and unity and commiseration I feel from the attendees. During the first WPCampus I was fortunate to be a part of so many conversations with folk who were either just meeting for the first time or who had not seen each other in person in a long while, but who shared so many common experiences and struggles.

These folks are building at enterprise scale with a fraction of a commercial enterprise’s resources. They face all the same challenges as the most high volume web agencies without the luxury of being able to fire bad clients. They have to deal with use cases that many developers loath touching. Many of them are working at public universities where funding and resources are getting tighter and tighter while the demands are only growing for better tools to educate the next generation. The love and passion they show makes them stand out in a field of extremely passionate engineer minded people. I felt humbled to get to share this event with them and to sing with them.

I can’t wait until next year!

Design4Drupal: Seeing Richard Stallman’s office and the Freedom Trail in Boston

There was a certain magic in the air at Design4Drupal. I am not sure if it was because it was set in MIT Stata Center, which was designed by Frank Gehry, or if it was that you could see the inside window of Richard Stallman’s office (though I didn’t get to see Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s office), or if it was because the father of Responsive Design, Ethan Marcotte was the featured keynote speaker on the second day.  Maybe it was a combination of that and being in summer in Boston on the Freedom Trail with awesome folks from the Drupal community.  Anyway you look at it, this was a great event.

Food and Fun

I was fortunate enough to get into town the Thursday evening before the event and meet up with some awesome Drupal folks for drinks at the oldest tavern in the USA and some awesome dinner right beside the statue of Paul Revere on the Freedom Trail.

Lunch Day 1

We had wraps.  I had the black bean and salad.  There were cookies and muffins from breakfast left.  Unfortunately I can find no pics of this.

Dinner Day 1

There was no formal plan for dinner on Friday night, with the official after party scheduled for Saturday.  We were left to our own devices and a group of us wandered to one of the fine breweries in the area, Cambridge Brewing Company.  This happening spot just off the MIT campus had great service and a really good selection.  I had the lentil burger and shared some Shishito peppers.  I was delighted that for some people at the table eating these Japanese delights was a first.

Drupal Karaoke

If you find yourself in Cambridge, do yourself a favor and go to Courtside for Karaoke on the weekend.  The fun loving DJ made this a night to remember.  He danced along to and sang back-up for a lot of songs in between his DJ duties.  I was very impressed with the quality of performance from my Drupal community members!

Lunch Day 2

The wraps were replaced with Jerked chicken and awesome spicy vegan patties with greens and sweet potato mash.  Again, photographic evidence does not exist as far as I can find.  It was delicious.

After party

I unfortunately missed the after party.  I got on a plane to come back to my beloved San Francisco instead.  From all accounts it was a pretty good time, though this is only pic I can find.

The Sessions

Opening Remarks

Using Data to Build the New Mass.gov

Kyle Magida and Connor McKay

This was a really great insight into how the Commonwealth is using Drupal 8 and machine learning to better serve the people.  At the heart of their success there is a story about the management of metadata from the User Journey.  This project serves 42 major agencies, 150 other agencies, plus all the other commissions and offices.  This adds up to 100s of authors, 15 content types and only 4 design team members to keep a handle on it all.  Drupal is at the heart of this approach.  Being open source, it helps them avoid procurement, which allows them to move faster and freer.  This is a really great case study on the consumable API for metadata and relationships.  Check out the recording (to be added to the session page on the design4drupal.org site)

Making mass.gov data-driven and constituent centric

Brian Hirsch

This was almost a continuation of the first session, but went into a lot more detail on the nature of the project and how it came about.  Basically, they had come to a point of too many pages to go manually refresh, over a million individual pages on mass.gov!  They needed a strategy to go after the high value targets first.  They decided to start at the top, applying the 80/20 rule.  The research shocked everyone once they started down that path, 10% of content serves 89% of page requests.  The user journeys aligned with 20 different ‘clusters’ of government services.  This helped steer them into a clear path where they have now updated the most used pages to be compliant for serving people with disabilities.  It really comes down to unstructured data vs structured data.  He said “The page metaphor is evaporating. The idea of title and body is useless and outmoded, We needed to think in terms of ‘chunks of data.'”

Keynote Day 1 – Agile Design

Kelly Albrecht
Kelly started off his talk with a very surprising (to me) fact: Over half of CIOs consider Agile strategy discredited. His central point is that we are mostly misunderstanding what Agile is really all about.

Agility is adaptability to a change in the situation. Think Spiderman.  “Your agility is measured by the speed and effectiveness of your response.” This is completely reliant on a central set of values.
Values: Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, Courage.  Issues arise when there is a violation of one of these values. Very few of us are not doing the best we can. Very few of us are intentionally doing poorly.
Iterations provide an optimized awareness into a larger effort
getting into a shippable implement- make the best version of this you can
breaking larger things into workable pieces. Planning reduces stress
Agility is bringing good thinking to action quickly. Agile does not tell us not to have a plan, but to always be planning.

My sessions

I was very honored to be able to give 2 talks at this camp.  First up was a new talk I developed around the discovery process for sales and project planning with references to Motorhead. Everything Louder Than Everything Else!: Navigating stakeholder needs through better discovery

I also got the chance to share my love of storytelling with Every project is a story: Applying storytelling to your client interactions

How to Make Friends & Influence Strategy

Breann Kopcza

5 things to know:
Know your audience
Share a purpose
Get involved
Own a communication role
Keep your POV simple

 

DAY 2
Debugging, Profiling, & Rocking Out with Browser-Based Developer Tools!

Mike Herchel

It was wholly appropriate that we were at MIT, the birthplace of the term ‘drinking from a firehose‘ to see this talk.  I did my best to keep up with him but after he showed me you can turn on from the document.designMode flag, I was distracted.  Here are the parts that I did write down.
Cmd + Shift + C = devtools open (no more right mouseclicks needed)
H key toggles visibility via the hidden property when you have highlighted an element in Chrome dev tools.
in the console insert: document.designMode = ‘on’; (mind blown).
chrome://chrome-urls/ (works in airplane mode), flags-> experimental canvas dev tools
requires restart and then turn on under settings in dev tools

This does not to this talk justice.  This is a weeks worth of tools and tips in this talk. Seriously go check it out once posted on the session page.

Keynote – Responsive Design: Beyond Our Devices

Ethan Marcotte

It was a real pleasure to see one of the thought leaders of design, the man who coined the phrase Responsive Design.  He started off by asking “Where is this all going?  Where do we go past Desktop design?”
As we are moving from page to patterns, it matters a little less what the answer is.  He said “I thought I would redesign patters, instead they redesigned me.” Since going down this path has lead him to a single driving question that keeps him up at night, “What if someone doesn’t browse the web like I do?” This is the most import question in his process.
A well crafted responsive design is device agnostic – a good guiding design principal.  He feels we are in a golden age of automation tooling for style guides creation.  He talked about tools like Pattern Platform Labs and Fractal.  He ended by telling us all to go and read a work that has really inspired him:
The Language of Modular Design by  Alla Kholmatova

We are not preparing for more desktop browsers, though their numbers are not shrinking.  Instead we must learn to expand our understanding of the smart phone and realize that there are a billion new users coming online soon. They are in developing countries, young and on a 2G connections.

 

Wrapping up

Boston is an interesting city with a lot of history.  I dig the vibe as it reminds me of the bay area in a lot of ways.  I am looking forward to going back next month for WordCamp although that will not be in the same building where the Web standards that we leverage are written.  I am still a bit in awe that I got to participate in this camp and deliver 2 talks in those sacred halls of learning.

 

 

WCEU: Paris is hot in the summer and you have to walk a lot. Who knew?

I ended up in Paris at the end of a two week vacation that didn’t exactly go as planned.  Parts of my vacation were amazing, like being in the middle of the ocean on the Queen Mary 2 and getting lost in a 1000 year old castle in Luxembourg.  Other parts were not so good, like the lack of sleep, blisters and some other calamities happening.   All in all I had a good time but I arrived back in Paris exhausted and just all sorts of out of it.
The amazing views and the always awesome WordCamp community were there to revive my soul and make my trip to WordCamp Europe 2017 unforgettable and a wonderful time.
So much went on that week, that it does not fit my normal format.  It would be at least 4000 words to capture, with any accuracy, my experience. So instead, I am going to make a top 10 list of my favorite memories and then just post a LOT of tweets with maybe a few comments in between.

 

  1. Getting to hang out with my team, Drew, Andrew and Matt, plus all our peers and friends from the WP world was amazing!
  2. Contributor day saw us get a lot of work done, including moving the WordPress Marketing Team to a Trello team for easier project management and tracking.
  3. I got to see the Mona Lisa and most all the other awesome stuff in the Louvre
  4. I learned a good chunk of the Paris Metro by heart and am confident I could get around that city without consulting my phone too much if I had to go again
  5. Getting to give my talk about Improv to a crowd of about 700 people. That was pretty cool.
  6. Inviting my friend on stage during my talk and getting to play and improv game with her.  (see tweets below)
  7. Chatting with camp leads about running workshops at two different, unrelated WordCamps later in 2017.  This blew my mind that I am seen as a subject matter expert.  So grateful
  8. Having very reasonable vegan options at lunch at the camp and about 1/2 the meals I ate in Paris.  The others were a bit of a challenge, but thank goodness for couscous.
  9. Meeting so many awesome new friends in Paris and singing WCKaraoke at a new karaoke club where I was their first US customer and we brought a larger crowd than they ever thought possible for their venue.  Was such an amazing time!
  10. Being part of the event where the Gutenberg plugin was released.  I used this amazing new editor to create this post (though I could not publish as a regular post using the still in Beta.  Instead I constructed what you see with the tool then copy/pasted) and will for all new posts moving ahead.  It is lightyears beyond the old editing experience and introduced the concept of ‘blocks’ to WP.  Everything is a block and these blocks can be moved around and reshaped at will making for a completely new posting experience.  I am proud to be one of the first 100 downloads of the plugin. I did it while Matt Mullenweg was on stage making the announcement about the plugin.

Onto The Tweets!

Alex Denning @AlexDenning

Exhausting but highly productive day with the marketing team at WordCamp Europe. Got some really useful content done!

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Dario Banfi @dariobanfi

I can’t believe. I’m here. My first WordCamp Europe and it’s starting…

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Maik Gruppen @maikgruppen

A new feature project has been started by @schlessera to properly document the bootstrapping process

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Internetbureau Max @maxnl

Wij investeren graag in de relatie met onze klanten. Het is dé sleutel tot een langdurige en prettige samenwerking. Bevestigd tijdens

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WP Smoothie @wpsmoothie

Aujourd’hui c’est le Wordcamp Europe. Plusieurs conférences sur la sont proposées.

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David Bisset @dimensionmedia

“Trust no one – don’t trust the people who wrote previous code, nor users that enter data.” @markjaquith

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David Bisset @dimensionmedia

Next lightning @WCEurope talk: “Translating WordPress into a Language Nobody Speaks” @swissspidy

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View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Petya Raykovska @petyeah

Sitting here bursting with pride from so much awesome showcased work by the polyglots teams 🌎🌍🌏

· France
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David Bisset @dimensionmedia

.@alice_s_still on now at @WCEurope talking about how they started and developed her local WordPress meetup.

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Rocío Valdivia @rociovaldi

“You catch more flies with honey”. Thanks @strebel for sharing your experience. What an inspirational talk 🙂

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Eugene Molari @EugeneMolari

Good talk by @McDwayne about @WCEurope . I particularly liked the “I love” & “Yes, and …” games. Also constructively!

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TinyMCE @tinymce

Weaving threads between + , @mcdwayne delivers a magic carpet of empathy,humanity,and self-awareness. Coding? It’s This

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Few things in life have made me as proud as having TinyMCE tweet about me.  Even though in this post I am abandoning their editor, the internet would NOT be as good as it is without their amazing work!  So happy!!

TinyMCE @tinymce

Living style guides from @sarahsemark can help you battles the monsters in your Code closet. Just make sure it’s not a zombie guide

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WordCamp Europe @WCEurope

.@michaelarestad states that a 12-year-old helped with the rest API. Mentoring, communicating, and patience are key.

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WordCamp Europe @WCEurope

In this talk of @mor10 gave an intro to CSS Grid and its impact on design Thank you Morten!

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Sandra Boulou Web18 @Web18_Paris

Very proud to be volunteers at the WCEU, une expérience si enrichissante, si émouvante, 92 pays différents réunis autour de WordPress

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SiteGround @SiteGround

What an event, can’t get enough of it, see you at the after party WordCampers

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Prospress @Prospress

You’ve been practicing your robot dance moves at and now the dance floor awaits @the after party @GoRobotNinja

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WCJax: Driving around Jacksonville in circles

It might just be my experience, and it might be specific to the locations I found as destinations, but Jacksonville has a very circular road system. There was a lot of road construction as well. As one friend put it “You’ve got to make 3 rights to take a left. As you pass the place, the GPS still says 5 minutes remaining.”  This aspect had it’s positives.  I only remember a few left hand turns, which as UPS has proven, makes for overall more effective routes and fewer accidents.   It also gave me more time to hang out with the awesome folks who gave me lifts around town at WordCamp Jacksonville, #WCJAX.

 

Food and Fun:

Speaker Dinner:

I went to The Blue Bamboo almost as soon as I arrived, meeting the other speakers for the camp.  It was great to see so many folks, who, in some cases, I had not seen in a long while and who, in other cases, I had seen last only a couple weeks ago.  Most dinners I attend have an open lounge style seating, with a mixture of high and low top tables.  Here we chose banquet tables at the start for our seats to remain in throughout service.  It was cozy and friendly.  Country fried chicken and crab won tons were on the menu and I had salad, broccoli and rolls.

Here we also got some lovely speaker swag including some locally made taffy!

Sunday Lunch:

We didn’t have to leave the premises to find our food at noon time. We had wonderfully prepared BBQ on the first day from Sonny’s BBQ.

While most folks got down on something that looked like this:

They also had some pretty awesome veggie options:

After Party:

We returned to The Blue Bamboo for the after party.  This time we were treated with veggie spring rolls and potato croquettes as well as two different type of dumpling, pork and shrimp.  Board games were out and folks had broken off into various factions battling for Park Place or the coveted moment when you connect four.  Many a good conversation were had.

Unfortunately my phone died while on my way to the after party.  While I did get to charge it there, I was not able to take any pics when I first arrived and the thing was in full swing.  So instead, here is a nice picture of the camp folks in the morning:

We did make an attempt at #WCKaraoke. But alas, the laws of that area made the bar we had chosen a ‘smoking only’ lounge and we couldn’t find group agreement on an alternative.  It was still a good attempt in my opinion and I had a very nice time.

 Sunday lunch:

The picture below is not the exact lunch we had, but it is pretty close.  The best parts were the Soyrizo from a local awesome producer and various hot sauces which I had not seen before.  Unfortunately, no photos I can find exist of this meal.  It was a good one where I got to meet a few new folks, so I am a little bummed at that.  I am also bummed that I didn’t catch the name of the caterer, I will try to update this with that info.

 

The Happiness Bar was in full effect as well.  There were many a good conversation and problem gotten to the bottom of in that little room.  There were also a lot of mini Slim Jims, oranges, nuts and snack mixes to go with the gallons of coffee.

The Sessions

There was no keynote, just opening remarks from the good folks at Keiser University, which was playing host to us that weekend.  “At Keiser University, You Receive Your Education One Class at a Time”. This educational approach is one of intent focus on a single problem set, which I think fits in well with some of the better development practices I have observed over time.  Their website is also WordPress, which make us feel right at home.

Mental Health for Everyone, Esp. WordPress Professionals
Laura Lane

We started with a mindfulness exercise.  A seated dead head roll with focused breathing.  This was a very great way to start the day.  It turns out that this is a great way to start every morning, since Cortisol levels are the highest in the morning. She said you could argue that you really don’t need coffee in the morning, that it would be the afternoon that you might need to step on the gas pedal.

It is important to recenter at least once a day.  It doesn’t have to be elaborate or time consuming.  She suggested using apps to give it a try.  Secret is consistency, trying just 5 minutes a day for 30 days.  That pattern is the key to success with this.

Team Publishing in WordPress
Steve Burge

Let’s face it.  The built in WP default editor is kinda lacking.  Even as I write this here in my editor I am wishing I was just writing in a Google Doc.  Even our beloved Matt Mullenweg called it “the best collaborative document editor on the planet right now.”  Which is exactly why Steve was excited to talk about the idea of leveraging it and other tools to make the team collaboration better for publishing, including tools to publish directly from Google to your WP pages.  PublishPress is another one of the tools making amazing strides in this direction.  Permissions is another area where there is room for improvement and we are seeing some advancements on the horizon.  I had not considered before this talk the possible role of Calypso with the rise of Guttenberg, but there is a compelling case to be made for the future where better page design on a local is the norm.  I left with a lot to think about and a lot of things on the horizon to be excited about.

The Biggest WordPress Myths Debunked
Lauren Jeffcoat
MYTH! It is just for blogs
It is not just for blogs, it got popular that way since it was easy to publish. But you don’t have to just publish blogs.
MYTH! Plugins are bad or cause trouble.
False: Bad plugins are bad and too many overlapping bad plugins are bad. Only use what you need.  Plugins are good. But if you don’t use it, just lose it! Delete those inactive plugins, or keep them up to date.
MYTH! WP is too complex
This is not true, lot of easy ways to get started and many tools and training resources to help. Best practices around standard processes solves a lot of these issues.  Yes there is a learning curve, like with anything else.
MYTH! it is not secure
WP is a big target, that is true, but it certainly can be secure.  It is up to good practices around security from you, your hosting and the code itself.
A good hosting company can help boost your site’s security. (I personally believe this a lot!)
MYTH! You get what you pay for…free = no quality. no support!
Wrong! While there is no no 1-800-wordpress (that domain was available at time of publication by the way) but there is a whole community to help.  Tons of free help options out there if you are willing to learn.

Taming the Whirlwind
Nathan Ingram

This is one of those MUST SEE presentations.  I highly encourage you to find a version of this online.  I will likely update this post when this version gets posted. Meanwhile his slides are here.

No one has all of it under control. You are not alone. The common struggle is real! We understand the need for strategy, but doing it gets messy.  We get distracted and caught up in the day to day emergencies that confront us.
Putting a name to your problems help to understanding and defeating them.
He calls this flurry of distractions “The Whirlwind”, defined as the energy and attention needed to run your business. The Whirlwind is the URGENT!  When urgency and importance clash, urgency wins every time. The whirlwind never goes away! The whirlwind isn’t bad, it just is.
Delaying strategy doesn’t work. You need a plan to accomplish your goals in the middle of the whirlwind.  Without a plan, the whirlwind always wins.
He spends the rest of the talk explaining how to build and execute a plan. Your best friend in this is momentum, plan action items. Rather than try to re-explain it here, just go look at the slides.  This was a fantastic presentation and I am so glad I got the chance to see it.

Connecting in a Digital World
Jodie Riccelli
Like most people I meet in the WP space, her background is not a dev or a designer, nor a true agency model.  However, an agency, WebDev Studios, is where she works interacting with devs and designers all day.  More importantly she works with the clients doing something very near and dear to my heart, helping them implement their dreams.  Interpreting what the client wants into docs, some of which are very long and complex.
Through her experience she has noticed that there is a perception that ‘sales’ has became a bit of a dirty word.  She aims to change that.
“We don’t know how to engage, we want to be at a distance”. Apps do this for us and this is partly why we hide behind screens.
One of the things that made a difference for her cognition of this was a The Atlantic article from Paul Barnwell “My Students don’t know how to have a conversation“. He really illustrates that the main thing people what their children to learn to survive and thrive in the world is communication.  This is vital!
Sales really breaks down to the act of providing solutions the challenges the client might be having while being conscious of their budget.  That is all.  Really engage at every chance because everyone has something to teach you, if you will listen.  Let’s use words that entice engagement. Keep Informed!

You Created A Plugin. Now What?
Adam Warner
So you have a plugin.  Awesome.  Get that thing on the directory! It all starts with wordpress.org. This is the largest collected pool of users in the world.  Getting it out there is step one, but upgrades and extensions are the way to monetize!
Once you have that sorted, increasing sales is next goal.  Repo reputation really matters. 5 star reviews are great but replying to the 1 star reviews is super important too.  If your plugin is seen as having really good support then people will trust it more and be more willing to buy things.
Take care with how you write.  Good copy will drive installs. Good marketing content and good docs are equally important.  Content marketing is important!
THink about discounting and presenting the messaging at key junctures.  Things like exit discounts (when you get a pop up offer as you are about to leave a page really do work.  Cross promotions are a win-win situation.  Get your product and service associated with another reputable plugin to reach an even wider audience and build that credibility.
What will you charge, what will the market bare?  It turns out this just takes the courage to try what you think you can get and not be afraid to raise price, or lower them, as the market responds.  No secret magic formula.

 

A/B Testing, Which Way Does Your Duck Face?
Mike “Demo” Demopoulos

Yes I am going to still write this up, but stop reading this for 45 minutes (even if you don’t think you have the time to spare) and go watch this video.

A/B Testing is:
-Controlled – you can explain how things relate to one another
-Statistically Relevant – educated guessing
-Uses Micro Testing – changing one thing at a time

Don’t try to assign reason to user actions, you can’t. It will drive you batty. Let the data drive all decisions.
What to test?  Tese the buttons shape, drop shadows, color, size, font, text, images.  Basically test everything!! Everything!!!
But at this is your chance to play and have fun too.

 

My Session:

WP-CLI: wp yes you –can (AKA Don’t Fear The Command Line)

People were really engaged and asked questions throughout.  While time sorta got away from me, I felt as though I had a better conversation throughout.  This was my favorite time giving this talk yet and I am really looking forward to getting to do this again.

 Wrapping up

This camp was actually a lot of fun.  I know I started out with a complaint about the roads, but Jacksonville had some really cool parts and some really nice and interesting people.  One of my favorite moments though came from seeing how happy this man was because of finally getting his CalderaWP “Catdera Wapuu” Sticker.

Quick note: This was actually the second time I had made it to Florida in 2 weeks.  The previous week I was fortunate enough to attend my sister’s wedding.  It was a beautiful ceremony on the beach at sunset.  I could not be happier for her or her wife!  However, I am not going to miss the sand of that beach, since it is in all of my stuff still, almost 2 weeks later.

I might not make it back to Florida any time soon, but I am glad I went.  Winding streets and endless road construction aside, the Jacksonville WP community seems pretty good.

10 days on the road: some meta thoughts about this blog, myself and the Raleigh, Baltimore, and Chicago trip

I have grown accustomed to, and perhaps even fond of, traveling on a near weekly basis, all of my prior trips have allowed me a reset and return to my beloved San Francisco in between destinations. This trips was the first time I had traveled directly from one destination to the next in direct succession. This proved rather exhausting but at the same time exhilarating and strangely satisfying. I sit here and find myself surprised and confused by the complexity of what I have felt over the course of this journey.

I wanted to follow the general “overview/food and fun/sessions” model the other posts on this site take with regard to the three cities I got to visit, I am proud to say there are 3 such posts that cover those aspects, linked below. However, I thought a meta post was in order about the totality of the experience of this one.

Before I do that though I would like to clear the air about something and that is the intended audience for these posts.
That audience is me. Specifically future me.
The fact that you are reading this delights me, but this is a bit of a joyous happenstance rather than a deliberate intention. I thought it might be a good idea to take a moment to first thank you and then to give you a tad more context for this entire writing project. This is also some of my rationalizing not following SEO length best practices and just getting all the details as verbose as I care to.

So, thank you for reading.

Now, to elaborate on my content goals, I started traveling ‘for reals’ over a year ago in the Spring of 2016 and immediately fell in love with the lifestyle. The miles, the unpredictability, the family that is the other road warriors of the communities. All of it.

I got to the end of 2016 though, returned from WordCamp US and had a few weeks to breath and reflect. I had been keeping a list of all the cities I had seen on my trips, which is the oldest blog post on this site, but I was hard pressed to remember exactly who I had met where or what I had done at each place.  20 destinations that had all become a big ball of mud  in my memory.
That is why I started writing. To remind myself of the facts I thought were the most important to reflect on. Where I learned what and what party was which. And here I am today sharing it with you.
End explanation.

Going Meta

There are a few meta things that don’t fit ‘the formula’ exactly, but are critical to this overall tri-city journey, so I am going to encapsulate them as best I can in this post.

Biggest thing that was different going into this trip is that I turned vegan. Yep, I did. I have been debating with myself on if I should write about this or not. I want to be transparent and open here, with the hope that when I do reread this one day I will recall why I made the decision to not bring it up directly outside of this particular post.
It was not for health reasons, nor directly for environmental reasons, nor for the kindness to animals part. It is really because of two main factors.
The first reason is the one that I was tipped over the edge by a pretty vegan girl I was trying to impress by taking her to vegan joints. In pretty short order I realized that there is an awesome plant based foodie movement that is well underway. Once I saw the sheer creativity and amazing quality of entrees, well, the traditional ‘meat as the star of the meal’ just seemed lazy. It is one of those things that you can’t unsee. With dozens of types of vegetable and mushrooms available at pretty much any market the reality is that something like 90% of a traditional restaurant menus are some variation of ‘slices of animal with a starch and one or two options of veggies’. I have not eaten as good, novel or varied foods as I have since I made this plunge.
The second reason is actually indirectly because of Chris Lema’s brilliant talk “What got you here will not get you there.” Let me explain.  I grew up a Trekkie. ST:TNG and ST:V were my jam. That future is vegan. There is even an episode about it where they don’t allow a planet into the federation because they still used animals for food. if we want to get to Star Trek, using animals to synthesize protein and fats for consumption just seems hella arcane. This is literally a pre-agricultural society concept.

Now, I do recognize that there is a ton of privilege in that statement. If I had to source all my own calories, I would likely use animals to do it too. I am highly fortunate to have a life that allows me to think in such abstractions. But back to the point here, if we want to get to the point we can travel the stars, well maybe we better start focusing on how to meet nutrition in new ways.  If we are far from this rock and all we have is a fusion reactor to power us, we are not going to be wasting resources on cows, pigs, or any other animals for food. Right now it is 100% possible to get all our nutrition from plants but not nearly as affordable since the food industry and supply systems are not set up to support this yet.

This is why I am taking the plunge intellectually. To get the quality and availability of these foods advanced as far and as fast as I can. Voting with my dollars towards this kind of future where a machine on a wall spits out foods that do not yet exist that will delight our pallats in ways our ancestors couldn’t dream up and readily available to anyone who is hungry.

Sleep is not my goal
Yes, I get tired. Yes there is a price to be paid for this approach to living and staying this active. Yes, I am having an amazing time. I want everyone to feel the same satisfaction I do when a late night party turns into a friendship. Or when ‘just one more round’ turns into a serious business discussion with a ‘win-win’ solidly identified because of a personal trust that gets forged as the night flames with fire. I am at a loss for how to better communicate this though. I do fully recognize that this type of life is not feasible to some folks and fear alienating those who I do encourage to join the party.

What I am learning

What I have learned along the way. While I write about the various sessions I attend I rarely write about the impact that absorbing this much knowledge has been having on me as a human being.

I am ultra privileged to attend the breath of conference and camps that I do. I have attended and taken many notes at talks that varied from Symfony Framework tooling to how to be a better freelancer. Why accessibility matters to mental health best practices. How to write a theme to how to build a designation website. How important security really is to the internet to hot dish vs casserole.

My brain feels like it has grown in size over the last year and my frame of reference for the entire web industry has broadened immensely. I rarely stop to think about the sum total of what I have learned, but occasionally I have these little epiphanies that I know things that even just a few months ago I would have been hard pressed to attempt to explain. Things like answering questions around CLI use for a CMS. Things like configuring DNS to prevent search engines from indexing duplicate content (which kills SEO btw). Things like giving advice on how to write a session for a camp.

I am overwhelmed, even to the point of finding myself rather emotional at times, at the amazingness of this situation I am in. Of the rare opportunity I have been granted by circumstance and the fates and by amazing people who believe in me. I can’t thank them enough. I do my best to stay grateful.

Whew!

That felt really good to get off my chest. All of it. I had been stewing those thoughts as I formulated the other posts and I am very glad to have captured them here.

Thanks again for reading and sharing my journey. Let me get you back to the regularly scheduled program. Here are the links for the three cities in the normal format and order:
1) WordCamp Raleigh
2) DrupalCon Baltimore
3) WordCamp Chicago

WordCamp Chicago: Rain in the shadow of the Sears (Willis) tower but sunshine in our souls

I left Baltimore for the last leg of my 3 city tour was to the old windy city for WordCamp Chicago #WCCHI. Held in the IIT Business School in the shadow of the Sears (Willis) tower, people from all over gathered to learn from one another and rejoice in all things WordPress. The coffee flowed and the rain poured down. Still, it was a marvelous time and so much learning!

I was just in Chicago last month for Midcamp and was glad to be back in this metropolis. This time around I unfortunately didn’t get to see any improv, but I got to go sing some #WCKaraoke! It was a pretty amazing camp and I was glad this was how I ended this particular journey.

 

Food and Fun:

My camp experience officially kicked off at the speaker dinner over at the Jefferson Tap and Grill. I was reunited with some old friends from all over the world. I also had the chance to meet many other folks who I had not met before, since this was my first time at Chicago’s WordCamp. There was a very nice burger bar, with a reasonable veggie burger, with seasoned fries and pretty amazing pickles. I ate way too many pickles.

 

I set out from there with a new friend to go scout some locations for the possible WCKaraoke afterparty the following night.

We only went to 2 locations but the second felt right and was giant inside. In fact we would return here one more time that weekend to sing again, but more on that later.

Lunch:
On the first day of the camp we were lucky enough to have some pretty awesome catering by Chipotle. I am normally not a fan of the brand for various reasons, but this was a welcome lunch option since they have a lot of meatless options and pretty alright corn salsa. Plus their corn chips are pretty darn awesome. I ate far too many but those salsas were just too irresistible. I was particularly glad at this provided lunch since it was pouring rain outside and we all ate together.

Saturday after party:
Saturday we all were given 2 drink tickets to partake in the official after party over at the spacious and well staffed Jaks Tap. We had the option of trays of BBQ chicken, pre-assembled cheeseburgers, a salad with a lot of crumbly cheese and baked carrots. I ate a lot of carrots. Actually, not too bad of an option when you get down to it. Way sweeter and overall better flavor than a french fry and I didn’t feel bad piling them up. It was a great gathering with a lot of awesome conversations while the weather outside was pouring rain and miserable.

#WCKaraoke

After the party, comes the Karaoke! I have been to more than a few WCKaraoke parties that have had 5 or 8 people show up, which is still fun but makes you wish more people would make it out to sing together. This time, about 1/7th of the camp showed up to Blue Frog’s Local 22 to sing together. We arrived a tad before the karaoke DJ was ready to go, which gave us ample time to select our songs of choice. By the time he opened up the sign-up process the line stretched 30 deep, mostly from WordPress folks! He said it was the longest starting list he had ever had in his time at the bar.
We had a blast and everyone agreed this was one of the best parts of a camp. Being together doing something so joyful and celebrating each other’s talents. And what talent there was! I have never heard better versions of ‘Fever’ which was mastered by Bridget Willard, or “Minnie the Moocher” by the always entertaining Adam Warner. I really didn’t want the evening to end but I was feeling the road weariness and faded off before my second song was called. I was told later that they called my name not 10 minutes after I split, so lesson learned, or rather reinforced, go all the way, just should have pushed through to sing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ with the group. Next time I will power through!

Sunday coffee was plentiful and much needed.  Just your standard conference fare and we were on our own for lunch.  I had the joy of finding that Chicago has several Native Foods locations, one only a few blocks from the venue. It is animal product free but it is the junk food version of that.  So good, so greasy!

The Sessions

There was no keynote at this camp. Instead we had some light opening remarks from the organizing team and a very warm welcome to Chicago! Since I had my partner in WP Andrew Taylor with me, I had the chance to pop in on a few sessions.

Fun with Chrome’s Developer Tools
Steve Stern
I had met Steve the previous night at the speaker dinner and was very intrigued by this session. I have been using Chrome and Firefox built in dev tools for a while, but was doing so rather piecemeal, just picking things up as I went along and always being delighted by discovering some new functionality. This session was a pretty great overview of the tooling within chrome and I picked up more than a few tidbits making this a great session for anyone else on a self education path. The main thing I had overlooked was the mobile view options built into chrome. I had never played with it before and was always relying on Customizer mobile view. That method isn’t bad, but the Chrome route seems much better by comparison. There was a lot of tips from crowd during the Q and A. This turned the last 20 minutes or so into a really great discussion lead by Steve.


Categories, tags and custom taxonomies – oh my!
Becky Davis
I have a lot of theoretical knowledge of taxonomy left over from my previous life in sales when I worked for a machine learning algorithm company based in Northern Ireland. They were focused on a “Semiotic Classifier” that could automatically generate tags based on the interrelation of the symbols in a document compaired to large volumes of other similar text blobs. This is an exceptionally great method of working across scientific abstracts and book descriptions. Anyway, this particular view of taxonomy is not super helpful to me when dealing with WordPress, so I went to this talk to get some more functional understanding. And git it I did.
Some of the basic tips I picked up included that if it is in the title, it does not need to go into the tags or taxonomy. Taxonomy should be seen as the parent term of any tags, the same way Mammal is the parent of Rodent or Marsupial. And the biggest take away I am going to start using moving ahead is Common Sense SEO means “human readable”. The title has to have something to do with the article. If you write SEO for machines to find then google will ignore it.


The Time I Broke WordPress.org
John James Jacoby

There is not a lot I can add to what JJJ told us about his experiences. I highly recommend going to WordPress.tv and watching similar talks he has given.  This guy is the epitome of what a solid WordPress dev should be striving for.

Sneaking in Good UX Without a UX Budget
Anthony D. Paul
I walked into the talk thinking this was going to be about adding discovery steps and limiting scope of a project for the UX minimal standards. What I got out of it was a lot more than that. Anthony patiently walked us through the “5 Cs”
Rather than try to explain this fully here, I found a blog that actually talks about this pretty well.  I think Anthony’s version is way better but you will have to watch it yourself when it hits WordPress.tv

My Session:
I was delighted to give my current favorite talk, which is (not so) secretly a workshop: Every project is a story: Applying storytelling to your client interactions
The crown was twice the size of the last audience I delivered this to back at SANDCamp and it was pretty great to have that many people in the room. As with any talk where I ask for participation I gave full permission up front to leave or just sit there during the interactive portions. This resulted in about 15 defectors from the initial group of about 65. Those that stayed though were very engaged and I had a lot of follow up conversations with people and heard some pretty great feedback. I also got a few points of structural feedback on my delivery and will be modifying a few things to make the next time I deliver this (which is currently scheduled for WPCampus even better.


Forecasting the Future: Business Practices and financial forecasting for a growing WordPress business
Jason Knill
This was a pretty in depth talk that I initially feared would become a spreadsheet read-along, as other forecasting talks I have attended over the years have turned into. I was relieved though when this talk was really about building a solid team and thinking in terms of growth vs survival. It was a great discussion with the audience on how the Give team had grown by being open and trust based culture. I walked away with a whole new respect for the many faceted face of the small business owner. Anyone who is thinking of building a team this is a must watch.

From freelancer to “feelancer”: Three keys to less stress and more success

Antti Koskenrouta

Few talks start out with as clear and concise “why you should listen to me” than Antti’s talk. As he started he invited us to celebrate with him his 6th anniversary of going freelance. He has managed to build the life he wants by setting goals and working with his defined parameters. Luckily for all of us he was more than willing to share his experiences and learnings from the last half decade. There were a lot of juicy tidbits and the talk really felt like a ‘best of’ from all the other ‘how to be a freelancer’ sessions I have attended. There was the minimum viable hourly rate, paying yourself first, doing your taxes, hiring professionals to do things like your taxes and making sure you have done your taxes. There was a ton of valuable learnings and I am including a few more twitter pics than normal on this one to show some of the key points.

How to Develop a WordPress Theme from Scratch
Tania Rascia
It is rare that I get to see a talk that comes from the author of a #1 search result. In this case it was “build a wordpress theme”. Go google that and look at the first result. For me it is before the official WP codex.
Tania, who is a pretty awesome singer by the way who helped with the karaoke venue finding mission after the speaker dinner with a few others, gave us a quick and fast version of her blog in person and lead a pretty detailed discussion on the topic. Turns out theming in WordPress, from scratch, is much more straight forward than I had imagined it to be. One of the biggest questions I think it answered for me is ‘why would I ever try that?” Especially in a world with thousands upon thousands of free and paid themes for site building. The answer, for me at least, is it unveils the sophistication of any theme by knowing ‘how the sausage get made’ from doing it yourself. I now have a lot more respect for theme shops and know how to start troubleshooting a lot better the next time I have a theming issue. The tak is great, but I would highly encourage you to go read her blog and build one yourself!


Support Starts Here: How to go the extra mile to make and KEEP your customers happy
Lauren Jeffcoat
The very end of the day brought with it one of the more important talks I have attended recently. No matter who you are or what you are doing, in some way you are going to have to deal with support. Either as a client or as a support person or as a business owner. You will touch support at some point in your life. Understanding what makes for successful interactions will make or break the consumer/vendor relationship.
She tells some pretty horrible horror stories from her real life and places where she felt the vendors have failed her. She also told of a very positive story where an American Airlines staff member went well above and beyond the minimum response and took good care of her in a pinch. She ended up getting thanked by American and the staff member was rewarded for his good deed. The result is a loyal customer and a personal connection to a brand that could not have been established in any other way. 68% of the time a client abandons a brand it is due to poor customer service experience. Let’s keep customers happy by managing expectations and connecting to them as real people, not just wallets with problems.

 

Wrapping up

Right after Lauren’s talk I headed to the airport where I started working on these last few posts. I learned a heck of a lot and I felt physically exhausted. Just the way I love to feel. Wheels up took a few extra hours and it felt so good to come home to my beloved SF, but I can already feel the itch growing again. I am already starting to become eager to get back out on the road and be with the WordPress and Drupal communities. Those are my people. That is where I feel at home.

Lastly:
To those who might be reading this and are NOT currently part of your local open source communities, what are you waiting for? This is your invitation. Go look on Meetup or feel free to ping me on slack or email and I will be glad to send you in the right direction.

DrupalCon 2017: Baltimore is way nicer than you think it is

After #WCRaleigh I headed to Baltimore, MD to DrupalCon 2017.

This is THE BIG SHOW for Pantheon! The biggest event for Drupal every year. This was the 4th one I have attended in the US, 5th overall. My first DrupalCon was in Austin, TX in 2014. It literally changed my life. Before that event Pantheon was just a really awesome job in the valley, for sure my favorite so far. But from day one of that event a few years back I realized that Drupal was way more than a pile of code. It was a real community.
Austin was also where it first hit me what the heck Free Open Source Software was really all about. Free as in speech, not as in beer. Free as in society, as in enthusiastic voluntary community.  Walking away from this year’s event, I had been reminded of that point and feel an urgency of renewed purpose for making this whole free and open internet thing work. More on that later.

Monday:

My week at DrupalCon started with the Community Summit. This is meant for the folks who have organized community events like DrupalCamps, Meetups or anything else community focused. I arrived fairly late in the day, due to a few travel hiccups. The day was already in full swing and I raced to catch up, which was not too hard since everyone was eager to help me get on the same page. I was very grateful to be included in the conversation and feel I saw some real progress in the team I joined. It was awesome to work with my fellow MidCamp organizer Avi Schwab  and organizer of DrupalNorth Aiden Foster to further the cause of making Drupal Community happen. I highly encourage you to go participate locally and do what you can to keep things growing.

Directly after the community summit ended, the conference floor opened up to attendees to meet and greet the sponsors. This is when we got to roll out this year’s version of Booth Demo Magic. This is one of my favorite things about working at Pantheon. It is part magic show, part TED talk and part “Mother of all Demos”. This is where we unveil the amazing work we have done and get people fired up about the future of the state of the art.

This year was the best year in in my attending. Watching the demo is the only way to get a Pantheon shirt, which is screen printed in front of you on demand and in previous years, this was the main reason a lot of people who already knew us watched the presentation. This year, dropping the names of tech we were going to show how we integrate with caused such a huge stir that I think we might have had the same turnout even if we didn’t have the best shirt of the convention. As people passed and I said “Do you want to see CircleCI with automated testing setup from a single CLI command” heads snapped our direction, eyebrows raised up and people turned around to go find a place to sit in front of our screens. It was amazing. Really set the tone for the rest of the con.

 

Food and Fun:

Monday night dinner:
Every year Pantheon sends a large number of us Pantheors to DrupalCon and many of these folks work remotely. DrupalCon gives us a rare chance to sit down as a group and have a good meal. We were not disappointed by the friendly staff and quality of food from Roy’s Hawaiian Fusion. Very tasty and I found out there is a ‘secret vegetarian’ menu they do not advertise but which has some pretty OK offerings. If you go, ask for it.
#Drupalcrawl
No Drupal event of this size would be complete without a good old fashioned bar crawl and I left the Pantheon team dinner to join the unofficial official #Drupalcrawl as it pulled into the last scheduled stop, Tír na nÓg Irish Bar & Grill. It was so great to see so many of my friends from all over the world in one spot to raise a glass to Drupal. Special shout out to the crawl organizer Jason Mickela. He is one of the nicest people ever and the smoothness, inclusiveness and togetherness of this event re-enforced that notion. If you are looking for a low stress thing to do with your local Drupal (or any other) community, suggest a pub crawl and let the bars do the heavy lifting.


Tuesday
Coffee before a keynote was mandatory and I dug into my snack bag for breakfast, which is mostly almonds and a few other goodies to keep me going on the road. Coffee was abundant and OK for a trade show.
Lunch on the other hand was absolutely amazing. I went with the special meals option and was rewarded with fresh and delicious food that looked way better than what was on the buffet lines. I had a delicately crafted mushroom ravioli and pretty great veggies on the side. The care and attention to folks with dietary restrictions was pretty epic and I applaud the Baltimore Convention Center catering team. Well done!

 

Tuesday Partner Dinner:
Working primarily with agencies here at Pantheon over the last 3 years I have had the extreme pleasure of getting to be part of the Partner Dinner at DrupalCon, an annual tradition to say thanks to the fine folks at our partner agencies that leverage our product for their livelihoods. It is such an honor to get to sit and talk with these folks and hear the stories of how their lives have been impacted by the tech we work on.
The food was pretty OK. For the second time that day I went with a mushroom ravioli and a very lovely bowl of berries for dessert. Not to knock this place but the lunch was, by comparison, on par with the quality of this upper scale private dining venue. I ate my fill and I think they nailed portion sizes, which was great because I didn’t need to be in a food coma to make it to the next stop:

DrupalCon Karaoke!
If you have been reading this blog, you already know how much I love karaoke. The music, the drinks, the togetherness and most importantly the act of publicly displaying the love for a song. We were in real luck in Baltimore as the Tin Roof had live band karaoke! A four piece band backed up singers, giving them the choice of hundreds of songs. They even claimed to know many more than were in the songbook but they listed out the most popular for us all.

There were about 100 Drupal folks gathered together and we didn’t all get the chance to take the stage, but we all had a chance to cheer and sing along. The band was even so gracious as to extend their time. Being a particularly dark and rainy night in Baltimore, we got the vibe that without the love of the con-goers they would have wrapped it up early and called it a loss. Thanks to the good Drupal community believing enough we made it one of their best nights ever we were repeatedly told. Karaoke is an amazing way to bring folks together. Make sure you are singing with your community!

Wednesday

Again, the lunch options for special diets were pretty good, though I had the bar set extremely high the previous day, so I wasn’t as bowled over. I had a poblano stuffed pepper with daiya and I think cashew based filling. That part was awesome. The rest of the meal was chips and run of the mill guac. Living in California I will admit I am completely spoiled on fresh super high quality avocados, so most pre-packaged guacamole is belh at best. Desert was a cookie, which I did not try. Coffee was pretty OK too.Wednesday night brought the largest of the out of venue events:
The Lullabot/Pantheon party!Poster for the Pantheon + Lullabot party, head of the T-Rex fossils and the logo of both companies

Every year this party gets a little bigger and wilder. This year was the biggest yet and was a real hands on experience. The party took place at the Maryland Science Center! We were surrounded by dinosaurs, interactive exhibits and all sorts of fun and drinks. Really an amazing time and so many good memories made. The photo booth was hopping from open until they kicked us out at the end.


The un-official after party:
All I will say about this is vegan liquid nitrogen ice cream, Chaz Chumley on DJ duty, Andrew Mallis and his crew to the rescue on supplies and community making a crazy night awesome! That’s about all I care to say. Other than that, you really just had to be there. After all…what we do is secret.

Thursday
The morning started with much, much coffee and the best keynote of DrupalCon! Lunch was a pretty solid veggie wrap, chips, cookie and salad. Of the 3 days, this was the most standard convention fare of the week on the special diets menu. Nothing to complain about but nothing so outstanding as that ravioli on day one.

For dinner there was a large contingent of folks I like going to get some crab, which Maryland is pretty famous for. I accompanied them to get a drink but looked elsewhere for food. I was certainly glad I did for a couple reasons.
First, it was the best greens I have ever eaten at this pretty awesome vegan soul food joint called The Land of Kush.  Even if you are not down with the plant based food path, seriously go check this place out. Pretty epic food at ridiculously low prices given the portions.


The other reason I was glad to have split off was the walk back. Yes I walked across Baltimore and I think I hit every best neighborhood in the whole city on that walk. Baltimore is only known by many folks because of The Wire. This show focuses exclusively on crime in “America’s Finest City” What they leave off is there are parts where it feels like the nicest parts of Manhattan or DC. From the Washington Monument to Power Plant Live, I followed a path filled with quiet parts, statuary, interesting and very old architecture. I felt very safe the whole time and recommend this walk if you ever get the chance to be in this east coast gem of a town.

Trivia Night!
My official end of DrupalCon was once again this fun filled evening of trivia and fun with us answering some interesting and at times frustrating questions at the Baltimore Soundstage. It was great to work with my old friend Jeremy Rasmussen and some new friends to have a good time and a few laughs. It was an ideal way to cap off the event and I left exhausted but very happy.

 

The Sessions

Since I was there to hustle at the Booth Demo Magic I didn’t get a chance to see many sessions. I did see a few though and really wish I had been able to see more.
The Prenote!
Every year JAM is the Master of Ceremonies for this lighthearted spectacle, designed to get us awake and ready for the Driesnote and the rest of the day. This year there was a bit of a somber, slow start. As you might know there was some controversy in the Drupal community over the last few months and JAM addressed this at the start. It came as a plea for healing and h provided a few links with resources he thinks will help guide us to be a better community overall.
With the tone now set to a bit darker than expected, we saw a colorful cast of costumed characters emerge on stage and the real prenote fun turned on. We met a green haired DrupalCon newbie named “B. Ginner” who was shown the ropes by a whacky bunch of community folks through song and dance. The biggest lesson is that at DrupalCon, “you can’t go two steps without a hug”. In fact this is officially part of the PHP coding standard, PSRB8.
If I had not already sensed it, this was the signal that DrupalCon was going to be good this year. Really good.

Dreisnote:
Here are my unfiltered notes:
“Sorry I hurt you, It hurts to see you hurting. Q&A best time to talk about that”
Focus on software
Drupal 8.3
15,000 sites per month launch with D8
Ambitious
YMCA not just a website, interconnectivity between systems is powerful
Drupal has evolved, from project for hobby to something as a powerful to power things
“enterprise” is misleading, non-profits and libraries are not really enterprises
Ambitous digital experience
ecosystem is ambitious as well.
“I was right” city of SF story
Lot of modules to port, please do that
1 million D7 sites need to be migrated
6 month release cycles are important
Depricated APIs will still be supported
D9 will Be d8 without the deprecated pieces
Going to make upgrade path simple and lot of time to update code as D8 evolves
8->9 should be as easy as 8.2->8.3
7-8 might be the last hard upgrade
Core team has added 4 people, with hundreds of hours of contrib
Previews of what is coming
impressive editorial process changes
autorespond-bot is on git hub (based on obama admin whitehouse work)

 

 

Project Management: The Musical!

The first non-note talk I got to see was “Project Management The Musical!” by the amazing duo of Allison Manley and Joe Allen Black. This was to be the final performance as they were retiring the session. I had been there over a year before in Midcamp when they had premiered it and was eagerly looking forward to see the last show in the run. It knocked my socks off and for only the second time in any session I have attended, I was part of a standing ovation. The other time was the opening show they did.
Rather than explain a musical to you, it is best to just go check it out here!

 

Know your friends, pick the right fights   

horncologne (JAM) and mathias.schreiber from Typo3

This one caught my eye as it was on the community stage and featured one of Drupal’s more colorful characters, the awesome mustachioed JAM, from the prenote. He was presenting with an unexpected guest, Mattias from Typo3 community. If you are not familiar with their PHP CMS project, you should take a look. They use some of the same PHP libraries and there is a lot to learn from it, much like we can learn from WordPress or Joomla.
What they spoke about shook me to my core and was a personal wake up call. I make my living off of the open source world and that world is under attack. They explained that although free and open source software seemingly has won the battle for acceptance in the enterprise world, that fight is far from over. While we have enjoyed a golden era of FOSS acceptance as the seemingly default ‘right’ approach, the large proprietary software makers have not gone away or even shrank. They are using their size and vaults to lobby for position harder than ever. They duo shared a few stories that have left me concerned in ways I had not thought about before.
First:
There is a set of laws on the books, but not yet enacted in places like France that say ‘a CMS must have a creator maintained SLA’. Yes, that means all CMS must have a creator to deliver SLA for their software to be considered for government contract. Who would be eligible in Drupal or WordPress? They also discussed the Canadian government’s recent RFP that was written to exclude open source on similar grounds. This is a troubling trend.
They also shared Joomla’s story of temporarily losing tax status for their event governing organization. This would have been disastrous had the other open source communities not banded together to help define German tax law. How close did we come to a slippery slope there? Too close to comfort for me.
The good news here is that it is not too late. We still have an upper hand as we have a whole community to act, which is more valuable than any pile of cash. We just need to work together to continually make the slice of the (web technology) pie bigger for all of us. Let’s compete against the non-CMS market and the proprietary stacks. There is enough room for all open source to win online!

Creating a Culture of Engagement: The ROI of Transparency and Communication

Anne Stefanyk

She started off with a dance party! I felt way more energized after that for sure!
I went to this talk because I am very interested in project and team management subjects. The more I learn it seems the technology, though sophisticated, is not the hardest part of a project to manage. It comes down to how you work with the other people involved. Disengaged employees are not good employees. Satisfied employees are OK, but not going to go above and beyond and ever do more than told. Solid though and not too hard to engage though. Engaged employees are thrilled to be there and feel personal stake in the effort. You want as many of these folks on a team.
Openness is the key to achieving this. Share everything. Trust your team.
It is important to remember that communication is different for different people. For example introverts find group exercises and discussions distressing, and extroverts might not do well with just online exchanges. Read books to help understand other’s perspective and definitely listen when given advice. Engage your teams.
The Q & A was very good with some real advice and tricky situations discussed. I was very glad to be there and this is a talk you do not want to miss!

Wait, there are 35 Symfony Components? What Cool Stuff am I Missing?

Ryan Weaver

Drupal 8 is built on Symfony, which is a collection of 35 independent libraries.  Drupal uses less than half of them! That means that there’s a ton of other good stuff that you can bring into your project to solve common problems…as long as you know how, and what those components do!
That is the session description from the website. I couldn’t describe it better. Go look at his slides This was the best technical talk I saw during the whole con.

 Avoid DEEP HURTING! Deployment beyond git

Socketwench 

Another technical talk, and the last non-note session I caught.  I have no need for such tools in my current role, but I strive to understand the deploy process and affiliated tools better all the time, since it helps me relate to the developers I am helping use my platform. Our presenter delivered a lot of humor and fun cartoons along the way while discussing a very serious issue and delving into multiple github repos. I felt very grateful at the end that I don’t have to hand build such a system nor maintain it. Very informative talk.

Technology and Its Workforce at an Ethics Crossroad

The last session I had the opportunity to see was the day three Keynote delivered by New York Times contributor and author Zeynep Tufekci.
Here is the short version. We are barreling towards Huxley’s dystopia, not Orwell’s. We are giving so much of our data away to folks who, admittedly are maybe not currently going to abuse it. But what about their successors? What about 2 generations out? These are tough questions. There are a lot of good things happening, but the potential for abuse is astounding. Make sure you check this out, if for nothing else than her story of a bus driver commandeering a bus for an earthquake relief process.
This talk really reiterated for me that the Free Open Source Software fight is more important now than ever before.

 

Wrapping up

I left Baltimore early in the morning for WordCamp Chicago. It was an exhausting week and I left feeling a little sore, but in amazing spirits about the future of Drupal and with a renewed sense of purpose toward FOSS. This was the best DrupalCon in so many ways. Go visit this city, it is a real American gem.