Tag: drupal7

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.

MidCamp: Chicago and my first time camp organizing

Chicago holds a special place in my heart for a few reasons. It is improv Mecca and I have lost a few friends to her stages over the years and continue to do so. It is also the home of Rock n Roll McDonalds, my favorite Wesley Willis song. And now it is home of the first DrupalCamp I ever helped organize, MidCamp 2017 at DePaul University Lincoln PARK campus.

This 4 day long event offered a full day of training on Thursday, two full days of sessions and a Sunday sprint day. I had volunteered to organize the last part. Having not ever done this before, I entered this trip with a bit of unusually nervous energy. Very fortunately for me the rest of the organizers made me feel very safe and supported and once again my MidCamp experience was awesome.

The Food And The Fun!

Thursday was trainings, but as with all Drupal events, there was room to Sprint as well. We had some simple box lunches with meat and cheese on wheat bread wrapped in plastic wrap. It has actually been a while since I had such a sandwich and it brought back memories of high school cafeteria lunches and vending machines at the factory I used to work at. Not unpleasant but a tad pedestrian given that the sprint room was in the student center and the air was thick with many varied food service options that ranged from BBQ pork sliders to teriyaki chicken bowls, soup bars to deli counter, sushi to pizza.

A small store with many types of food options, both hot and cold
DePaul’s Student Center Food Options

At the end of the Thursday Training/Sprint day, I was honored to attend the Speaker/Sponsor dinner held at The Red Lion Pub. This delightful English pub offered very charming decor with many books and WWII era posters on very high shelves and dark wood paneling to give it a homey study feel. The bar had my favorite vodka, a locally crafted one. This one was made from the same potatoes they used in the kitchen to make the french fries, Chipperbec. And speaking of the kitchen, there was a delightful assortment of food options, from fish and chips, to a vegan thai curry. Everything was top notch.
The food was only topped by the camaraderie I felt seeing many of my Drupal friends in person for the first time in many months. I left feeling stuffed and feeling really ready for the busy days still ahead.

Tired as I was, I still made time to go see an improv show that night over at The Annoyance. If I am envious of my Chicago friends for anything, it is their proximity to this theater. Given the nature of my talk, I thought it wholly appropriate to do some field research in the improv motherland.The Annoyance THeater sign, it is orange neon.

Friday morning brought the standard coffee, muffins, fruits, yogurt breakfast selections that are the common fare at so many conventions. I drank liberally from the coffee spigot. A brick morning pace had us at lunch before we knew it. Awesome wraps with many, many options for special/restricted diets. At every catered meal at the venue there was a cookie option for dessert. I am very proud to say that I resisted these at every turn.

At the end of the packed day capped by the lightning talks, we started Game Night, sponsored by Palantir.net. They even hired the Döner Men food truck to bring us some of the best döner I can remember having. It was hard to not go back for a second serving. I played a few rounds of Zombie Dice and before there was a movement to go to HopCat, a local diner themed bar with 140 beers on tap.

HopCat is where I met Malort. Take a second and go look at “Malort face“. That is exactly how it tastes and it is a Chicago staple liquor. Coming from the city that drinks 35% of the Fernet consumed in the USA, I totally get having a terrible tasting but worth it for the memorable experience drink. I am glad I drank it, but I do not plan to repeat the feat. HopCat also served up a dish they call Crack Fries. These are just seasoned french fries served with a white cheese dipping sauce. I have no idea what was on the, but I could not stop eating them.

Luckily I was able to tear myself away with a small group to go find karaoke a few blocks away at Harrigan’s.   As most people who know me know, I love karaoke and I am especially in love with small dive bar karaoke. This place was dead as we arrived around 10, but by midnight you could not move around at all it was so crowded. One thing that made this place really stand out was the DJ took pics and posted them on their FB wall in near real time. Really had a blast singing with my fellow Drupal family.

Saturday brought more muffins, fruit, coffee and even hardboiled eggs. This was also the day that one of the organizers brought us donuts. While I successfully avoided all cookies on this trip, I did befall to the temptation of these locally baked delights. The sugar rush made the morning speed by extra quick and crash landed me at the nacho bar for lunch. Many nacho chips, mystery meat scoops and jalapeños later I was sated and ready to give my session.

Saturday night was the platform.sh afterparty at one of the loudest bars I have ever entered. The ‘March Madness’ and the population of the venue assured that the roar was deafening in the main room. Luckily we had a back room reserved for us at far more reasonable volumes. Again I found a ‘semi local’ vodka, Prairie, which is made in the midwest over in Minnesota. Delightful stuff.  I had expected the food to be sports bar quality greasy bites and some of it for sure was, but there was very well executed teriyaki chicken and the best crab cakes I maybe have ever eaten. I was actually extremely glad that I left when I did, not only because the party’s tab had closed and the party was moving on to a karaoke place, but really because I could not stop myself from constantly returning for ‘just one more’ of those crab cakes.

Shoe’s Pub is where the party found itself next and this place was just great. Cheap drinks, many locals and students, and a pair of bullet style mics. The whole evening it was far more common to see duos or even small groups sing than solo performers. This gave the karaoke an extra special ‘we are all doing this together’ kind of vibe.

By midnight, karaoke was overflowing, too crowded to even breathe comfortably, so a motion was made to go see some legendary Chicago blues over at Kingston Mines. Once we arrived we realized that the line would not permit us to enter any time soon, so we went across the street to the slightly less famous but equally as entertaining BLUES bar. It was a night to remember for sure! It was also a great way to officially end the party for MidCamp, leaving only the Sunday Sprint to check off the list.

Thursday Sprints:

As I mentioned, Thursday was the main training day but it also gave room for folks to Sprint.  There was no formal plan or focus for the day, which gave rise to many people working on their own projects and getting help and feedback from their peers.  It was also time for the Organizers to finish many last minute tasks and get set up.  This was a great warm up to the camp days that followed.

Sunday Sprints:

This was not just the first time I organized a Drupal Sprint, this was also the first time I ever attended a formal one. I have attended contributor days on the WP side of the world and I have hacked at many a thing on Drupal, but this was my first real, on the books, official involvement with a Sprint. I loved it! I will at least be volunteering at future Sprint days as often as I can moving ahead.

Huge shout out to the folks who did the real heavy lifting of the day, the Sprint Leads!

First up, by coworker and friend David Needham, lead the first time sprinters on a ‘how to sprint’ session. This session introduced folks to how tickets worked, how to set up their local environments, and the many varied ways they might be able to contribute to the project.

We focused on three main areas for this sprint. Core, Drupal Commerce and Documentation:

The core team was lead by Adam Bergstein, who is not just a nice guy but also a security and best practice expert. I can’t name many other people I would have wanted leading that effort.

Drupal Commerce is a passion of Matt Glaman and it really showed, as he was the first to arrive at sprint day. If you want to contribute to Drupal Commerce, you can find the well organized queue here.

We had the dynamic duo from Drupalize.me: Joe Shindelar and Blake Hall focused on Documentation. This is such a crucial part of the project and one that is entirely accessible to all skill levels, making it very welcoming in general. While I tend to think of this as the ‘go to’ for new contributors, and some new folks for sure focused their energies here, we had newbies at all the tables. It gave me a great sense of hope for the future of the project seeing these new faces make their first contribution and leaving with so much done.

The Sessions

Keynote:

The Great Adventure of Open Source Contribution

Emma Karayiannis
Emma talked about her story of going from feeling like an outsider to being a project lead in a very short stretch of time. Besides focusing on the ‘why it is important’ message that is critical to communicate to new and seasoned folks alike, she also focused on how one can contribute. There are so many ways beyond just writing PHP code to make Drupal move forward. You can write docs, you can volunteer your time, you can team new people things you learned along the way and too many others to list here. Fortunately, thanks to some speedy internet access and the dedication of Kevin Thull you can see her slides and hear this keynote yourself here!

Sessions I saw:

I was very fortunate to have had several members of the Pantheon team with me at MidCamp so I was able to go to many sessions. If you want to see any of these at home, they are all online and available now on the individual MidCamp schedule pages.

Project Management and Yoga: Not Such a Stretch

I was immediately drawn to this session not for the Project Management or the Yoga, but because it was applying the lessons from one of the speakers’ passions to their tech related work.  This is something I have tried to do with several of my talks.  It turns out that both yoga and project management both use the concept of flows and there are some direct comparisons you can draw.  Agile methodology is analogous Bikram, where Waterfall is more akin to Ashtanga.  Ideas like ‘sticking to the plan’ and ‘internal communication being critical’ are mirrors of ‘practice the poses’ and ‘listen to your body’.  There was even a participatory section where we all learned some poses and stretched out.  I felt more limber and very encouraged about the idea of mapping divergent skills overall.

Building Great Teams

Drew Gorton
https://joind.in/talk/9910A

I was very fortunate to see several of my fellow Pantheors give talks at the camp. The first up was my manager Drew Gorton talking about the very reasons I like working with him. There are many ways to manage a team but it always boils down to some key factors like ‘putting the right person in the right seat.” You can have the most brilliant people on your team but unless they are doing something they feel passionate about and filling a needed function on ‘the bus’ then no one is going to be happy. He also stressed the importance of communication and need for connection beyond what is just on the page of a report data. He fielded some interesting questions as well and I am very glad I attended. Check this one out for sure.

 

 

Peak Productivity with Ivy Lee

David Needham

This was a very fun talk that not only gave a history and ‘how to’ of Mr. Ivy Leadbetter Lee’s priority management strategy, but also how our presenter transformed his life with this method in very short order. The very quick version is “write down the 6 most import things you need to do every day and do them. If any are left at the end of a day, simply move those to the top of tomorrow’s list.” This sounds really simple, and it is, but it is a very powerful tool to get done what needs to get done and feel a sense of success just from marking things off every day. David repeatedly made the point that this always felt amazing to do.
The real take away for me was actually another famous name’s process, Jerry Seinfeld. He was once asked how to be a successful comedian and he answered “write good jokes everyday”. On the surface this sounds like a disingenuous answer, but what he meant was, appy the craft every day and track what you did on a calendar. After a few days there will be a ‘chain’ formed of all the times you did the thing. The funny thing about human beings and these chains, is we do not like to break them once we forge them. I know I will be using this to mark off how I spend some of my time going ahead.

 The Magical Configuration Management Unicorn
Doug Dobrzynski
Doug started out this entertaining yet extremely technical talk by explaining that in fact Config Management is not a panacea for all conceivable ways to distribute Db config around the world.  It is for moving config from a dev or stage environment towards a live environment.  This is something I have a good deal of opinion around given where I work.  It is absolutely nor for packaging up config to move between entire projects.  I found it fascinating to hear the reasons why there has been so much love/hate of the Features module and Config Management in general.  Part of this is the gray area that is Content vs Configuration.  Not something I had really thought a lot about before.  My favorite moment came from the Q&A when an audience member lamented that, to him, “features is a hellish solution to a nightmarish problem” but that this talk helped him sort out how to make better use of the concept.

 

Connecting your Development Workflow to The Internet of Things

Steve Persch
Saturday morning sessions kicked off with one of the more fun full length talks of the whole camp, my teammate Steve’s talk about the internet of things.  For this talk he rigged up his great-grandfather’s 150 year old telegraph key (a work of art unto itself) to oranges as a power supply to light up an LED connected to the internet.  While there was a lot of fun and silliness to some of his examples, the core message was actually really powerful, which was “Connect your interests to your workflow” and “Follow the fear”.
The first point is really to start thinking about the tools we use as a part of a larger ecosystem of hooks we can string together to automate all the things.  And by the second point he really was encouraging us to go learn the tech that might intimidate us and trying to do it an a playful way with ‘toys’, maybe silly or childish projects that teach the skills with less pressure.  On that topic he talked about the need for joke modules, which are really meant to show off what a particular hook can do rather than filling production need.  Drupal 7’s Bad Judgment module was the prime example of this.  I am going to be looking into this module moving ahead, as well as all the available webhooks I have in the tools I already use.  If you listen to this recording you will even the infamous FauxAlGore give an intro to the subject.

Crucial Conversations: tools for handling difficult conversations

Chris Weber
No one likes having difficult conversations but it is an unavoidable part of life. How to have these conversations is something we also tend to avoid, which I never really thought about until I saw this talk. I have no idea how this topic has not been more widely discussed at camps but can foresee this becoming a much more popular talking point in the future.
The basics are that when people find themselves in uncomfortable discussions they tend to react towards internalizing which results in silence or externalizing, which leads toward violence. You want to stay balanced right in between those extremes in a place of healthy dialogue. This requires some meta conversation sometimes and recognizing that everyone needs to feel safe. If you are in a critical conversation and notice that the other party has shifted to one of these ends, it is OK to ask why and revisit the points that pushed them there in order to find resolution and move ahead.
My favorite part was Chris asking the room if we remembered when we were kids and figured out that adults are not mature? All kids have this moment and it serves to remind us that we should be treating people as people. After all you would not ever say to a toddler ‘they are unfit to lead and are bad people due to their work habits’ but we all too often think things like that of our peers. It is important to turn victims into actors and villains into humans to have constructive dialogue.

 

Mom Problems: How to Manage Life and Still Be a Great Developer

Tessa Kriesel

This was the final talk from a teammate that I got to see. This was a fantastic and very entertaining talk about some basic skills everyone should develop to be more productive.  These were all tips and tricks Tessa learned first hand from being a busy mother and developer and community organizer and many other hats.  The ideas ranged from the importance of journaling to keep yourself focused, on track and motivated on the big picture to the importance of self care and meditation.  Sprinkled in between these meatier subject she sprinkled some great and humorous one liners as Pro Mom Tips.  My favorites where: “Never EVER leave a Sharpie unattended”, “Your keys are always in the other pocket”, and something I can’t use yet in my life, “If you need some alone time, tell your small child to go dress themselves, which we all know is a joke.”

Drupal as a Political Act?

Tim Erickson

The final session of the camp was more of a group discussion than a lecture on the subject of free speech and free software. Tim reminded us that in fact “Free Software is not the same as Open Source”. That there is a core value to this that goes far beyond the development methodology of sharing the code itself. That there is a responsibility to the freedoms this is build from. It was a great group discussion with topics floating from DRM, desktop linux being a good solution these days and bid data privacy concerns. While energy was overall low due to the timing of the talk and the energy we had already exhausted from the two full days, this was still a very lively discussion with so many great take aways. I know for me, moving ahead, I will be saying I work in Free Software a lot more often.

My Session:

This was the 6th time I have had the opportunity to deliver this session. Each time I do I learn a little more and I find new ways to improve upon it. I hope to have the chance to do this a few more times before I retire the talk. The one thing that stands out the most to me is the extreme shyness and introverted-ness of some of the participants. I give some pretty clear trigger warnings and repeated reassurances that it is OK to sit out the exercises or even leave the room without any judgement if they feel uncomfortable. I absolutely and thoroughly applaud the efforts of these folks who stayed and gave it their all. I left feeling inspired by their courage to try something that outgoing in front of their professional peers.
Afterwards I even learned that in one case former teammates that had a terrible working relationship ended up learning they actually had a lot of things in common as a result of my talk. While it is too late to fix the issues they had as a team in the past this gave them new hope that if they worked together again they would be able to find a common chord and better collaborate. This might be my favorite thing I have ever helped anyone do with improv.

Lightning talks:

Friday ended with everyone regathering in the main hall for a round of Lightning Talks. These are ~5 minute talks on any subject of interest from the speaker. These are not done with a lot of prep time, as the speakers signed up on a sheet that went up 15 minutes before we started the talks. I had the extreme honor of going first and delivered a stripped down version of my “Every Project Is A Story” talk I had given at SANDCamp (link to it). Other talks included “How to convert your sodastream canister to be refillable”, “The time I took my mom to Drupal Northern Lights and she learned what “Drupala” is” and my personal favorite, Jim Birch’s “Theremin” history and demo. This last one will live forever as a giphy, which you can download here.

I almost put this up in the Food and Fun session since it was an absolutely outstanding time, but in the end this really does fall under sessions. If you are organizing a camp and reading this, please consider a lightning talk session at the end of one of the days or over lunch. It was such a great way to connect and get some extra learning out of an event!

Last, on a personal and community note I came into camp with a nervousness stemming from more than just my nervousness as an organizer. If you are reading this then you likely are aware of the Drupal drama going on. If you spend any time on subreddits then it would be easy to think that the wheels were coming off and we were taking sides.  I was more than relieved, I was overjoyed, that when I did see my fellow Drupal folks all together there was the same sense of togetherness and camaraderie that I have come to expect.  Even the subject of the drama showed up and I was proud to interact with him as if there was not anything going on at all.  Put everything in perspective for me and I am feeling much better about the state of D8 and the world.

Also, I could not have been successful as a camp organizer without the seasoned experts on the Organizing team!  Huge love to this wonderful amazing group of people.  Take a moment to go look and see the faces of this tremendous team: https://www.midcamp.org/organizers. While we all did a lot for this camp, a very special shout out to the Camp Lead who kept this ship running and made sure we organized, Mr. Jim Birch!

MidCamp was a blast and there were so many good times. I encourage you to go challenge yourself to learn more, better organize your priorities and become better communicators. I know I will. I can’t wait until next year!

Stanford DrupalCamp: Down on the farm

A very bright weekend greeted us at Stanford DrupalCamp.  After a really rainy winter with crazy weather that seemed to follow me to SANDCamp and Drupal Northern Lights, it was really awesome to have clear skies and the warm spring weather of Palo Alto.  I was very excited to be able to attend a camp close to home and to be joined by a couple colleagues who I do not normally get to travel with.

Unlike most camps and conferences I attend, most of the attendees at the camp worked for the same employer.  Stanford.  It seemed that many of the folks attending were there to learn about what other parts of their university were doing. And that makes sense given the size of the university and how many departments utilize Drupal in some way.   It gave this camp a very special feeling of purpose to have so many colleagues who rarely work directly together come under one banner for a weekend.

It also focused the discussion on internally promoting Drupal as the right solution for many of their needs.  This is an interesting problem set and one I have thought about a lot since I first attended WPCampus last year.  It was remarkable how the different departments and organizations sounded like the web development agencies I have worked with. Similar in goals and processes but with some additional problem variables on top.  While the challenges are great, I think the folks working in these institutions are doing great work and helping keep information moving fast and free.  I left with high hopes for the future of Drupal and its use in higher education.

The Food and the Fun:

A lack of planning on my part Friday left me without lunch as my team was setting up for the camp.  Very fortunately, the campus food court system was in full swing and I was able to buy some wonderful vegetarian stew to tide me over.  The conference coffee was pretty OK and they had a great tea selection.

5:00pm Friday found us outside The Treehouse for some fun, nachos, fries, wine and beer paid for by the awesome sponsors of the camp.  Many good times were had. Having talks the next day to prepare for and some other plans, all too soon we had to take off our homes.

Saturday started out with an amazingly awesome Lyft ride.

The sessions were great and the weather was unbelievably nice out.  It felt like summer had come to the peninsula.  We had standard fare camp lunch with sandwiches, apples, chips and cookies with our coffees and teas.  What make it awesome was sitting outside in the warm air on the quiet campus.

Saturday evening had us return one again to the quite nice Treehouse courtyard for some more food and fun.  All too soon we parted ways but not before some great times.

The Sessions:

Keynote:

It was a real treat to hear Dr Ronald Vogl talk about how and why LegalTech is or is not disrupting the legal industry.  I will admit, at first I was rather apprehensive about this talk.  While an interesting abstract, I was not sure how this would lead into our camp.  After all, the keynote is often what sets the tone for the general conversations at these get together. My hesitations were unfounded though, as I listened to his presentation.  On top of being a brilliant speaker, Dr. Vogl held our attention by laying out the realities of how technology is impacting one of the oldest professions on earth.

I had not really thought about it in the terms of automation of processes, but this is what technology based solutions like LegalZoom and RocketLawyer are essentially doing.  Making the dreary monotony of paralegal work the stuff robots can do easily.  The questions though become; how far up can we automate?  What does this mean for the current aging lawyers practicing who are seeing the market ‘disrupted’ vs the student or new attorney  who have had these as realities in the market since they began. Clearly someone who understand the technical side and the people side, our presenter was able to leave us thinking that technology is only going to keep evolving and thought must be given to how we choose to encourage how it evolves.

I am only going to talk about 3 other sessions for this post, but everything I saw or participated in was great.  Including talks by 2 of my colleagues, Greg and Peter.

How To Make a Snowflake with a Cookie Cutter: Innovative Site Building on Stanford Sites was a session on how the Office of International Affairs went from a hosted solution that had many barriers to make any changes to an internally managed Drupal installation that they could edit at will.  It was not an easy road but one that empowered their department to do more faster using an agile method.  The quote that really stuck with me though was “All good CMS implementations serve a content strategy”.  I think you can even remove the work good here, since at the end of the day we are just manipulating strings of content, that all CMS have a content strategy, intentionally managed or not.

The impact and power of this talk was magnified by the audience being made up of other Stanford staff who were learning how their colleagues in the OIA  took control of their own destiny, the risks that can bring and the big picture view of how this impacted their mission.  Really inspiring stuff.

Case Study: Big Data Visualizations with Carto & Highcharts was a talk from Jordon Koplowicz I really thought would be on how mapping data functions and flows.  It for sure covered aspects of that but it really was a fascinating story of how a company went from one technology for mapping to another and the challenges that brought.  While conceptually it was just taking data from one JSON file to another and crunching some numbers, that number crunching proved to be a serious challenge.  His slides highlight that there are some things that PHP and NginX do well and some things that do not.

More important than the technical specs was the journey he went through as a new developer on this project.  He also addressed the very real issue that sometimes a new technology gets forced onto a project for one reason or another. This lead to a line that got an audible chuckle from the crowd: “I hate this for 2 reasons.”  First that it was yet another layer of technical complexity and second it meant another developer was to be added into the mix who was an expert on the new tech.  He discussed how he dealt with those complexities and his enthusiasm about the problem itself was downright inspiring. He set a great example for every developer.

Website Musts: How to Define Everything That Your Website Needs to Do

This talk started with the question “How do we know when a project is done?”. Much like my talk about Discovery, the intent of Anne Stefanyk’s session was to give project managers and other client facing folks the tools to better manage expectations.  One of my big take aways is that the key to any successful engagement is clear scope and transparency of process.

Anne’s process relies on the the User Story and how they leverage these to great effect at Kanopi Studios and for projects like BADCamp.  The power of the user story is that they can tell you what the end looks like before you start.  She highlighted that while these user stories can be generated rapidly they should also come with early user testing and data gathering to drive their application.

 

My Sessions:

I gave two talks at this camp and I am very grateful to have had the opportunity.

My first talk was a new one I had prepared especially for this camp.  Discovery, discovery, discovery, discovery! The most import part of successful projects.  Originally I had proposed to have this be “the most import part of a sale.”  My background is in sales and I understand that topic pretty well.  After a conversation with the camp organizers who suggested generalizing this up to be more project focused rather than just sales, I did a good deal of research, modified the talk and learned a few things along the way.  I am very happy with the way this turned into a group discussion and sharing by the end of the session.  Truly great when we can learn from each other.

My other talk of the day was We Are All Making This Up: Improv Lessons For Developers.  This makes the 4th time I have delivered this session and I am really honing it in.  I am very much looking forward to giving this again at MidCamp 2017!  Being the last slot on the last day my attendance was about a third of the Discovery talk right after lunch, but the enthusiasm of the smaller crowd and the interactiveness of the example exercises made this the perfect sized audience.

Stanford is unlike almost any other camp I have been to.  It was the best weather of any camp I had attended in 2017 so far.  The people cold not have been nicer and the good times were had by all!

DrupalCamp Northern Lights: The time I went to Iceland and it snowed a lot.

I trudged though 51cm (20.07 inches) of snowfall to make it to Sunday sessions of Iceland’s first ever DrupalCamp Northern Lights  (#DCNLights).  I had to walk down the middle of the not yet plowed Reykjavik streets, still dark at 8:00am, beside cars covered in the most snowfall in a single night since 1937.  I was the first to the venue and was glad for that fact. It gave me time to dry my socks in the restroom without witnesses.  Baddy, our organizer, soon arrived. She said we were going to plan Z and if that failed we should not worry since the Icelandic alphabet has 3 additional letters than English, Þ, Æ, and Ö.

51cm of snow on cars in Reykjavik
51cm of snow on cars in Reykjavik

Hold on.  Let’s back up a few steps.

I was really excited to have my talk “We are making all of this up: Improv lessons for the developer” accepted to this camp.  This was out of the normal regions where I had been focusing on session submissions and I was pleasantly surprised I was accepted, especially after seeing the caliber of the other speakers on the schedule.  I am very grateful to my company for giving me the chance to attend and develop myself.  I have been to Iceland once before so, this was not intended to be a sightseeing vacation, but instead a chance to learn what the European Drupal world has been up to.  What transpired truly transcended either of these goals making #DCNLights a unique experience which I can only really described as a real adventure!

Iceland is an 8 hour ride from my home in San Francisco and an 8 hour time difference.  Taking off Thursday at noon PST put me on the ground Friday at 4:00am UTC.  Keflavík airport is approximately 50 minutes from Reykjavik and all the needed transportation to the awesome Galaxy Pod Hostel meant I got to bed at about 5:45am.
I was greeted with the worst weather Iceland has seen all year.  This caused havoc with the initial, and most subsequent, plans.  Fortunately the Icelandic way is to have backup plans to backup plans. This spirit of rolling with the punches really made this event amazing.

The Food and the Fun:

Plan A had consisted of all the speakers and attendees who could arrive on Friday to go on a Golden Circle tour, paid for by the largest organization to use Drupal in Iceland, Landsvirkjun, the national power company.  We were even going to tour their completely sustainable renewable energy plant that leverages Iceland’s geothermal properties.  We were to end the day with a reception thrown by the mayor of Reykjavik.  However, due to the storm, this plan was scrapped by the time I was on the airplane, since the tour bus would not be able to navigate the icy roads.

Plan B was to go for a city walking tour in the morning, maybe some ice skating donated by the city rink and finally the the mayors reception.  The rain and wind destroyed this plan as well by the time I woke up at 9:30am.  Honestly I was a bit grateful to get a few more hours of sleep.

Plan C was to just meet for Ice Skating and then to the mayors.  I valiantly attempted the 1km walk from my hostel to the rink but the sidewalks were a mess of ice and slush and the sleet was being whipped by the wind into my eyes, so I opted to get some work done and just go meet the mayor later. A few Drupalers did make it out and it looked like they had a stellar time.

23 people dressed for ice skating. half of them are sitting down
https://twitter.com/mcaleaa/status/835239718694567936

I met up with the crew who were pre-partying for the mayor at American Bar.  That’s right, I flew 4,199 miles to eat ribs at a place that is specializing in my country’s cuisine.  It was awesome to see familiar faces in this land of ice and snow so far from my home.  I was greeted as an old friend by all the Drupalers, even ones I didn’t yet know.

Red haired man with large glasses. named halldor audar svansson
Halldór Auðar Svansson

Plan D kicked in when we showed up to the mayors office and found that he was not able to attend due to other responsibilities.  Instead he sent us a member of the Pirate Party, city council member Halldór Auðar Svansson, who gave one of the best speeches I have ever heard from outside of our community on the importance of open source.  To paraphrase: “Drupal is free as in beer, which is something Icelanders like. It is good to be wise with the people’s resources.  But it is also free in another way that Icelanders also feel strongly about, transparency and commitment to community’.  We were given very nice beer and wine and hor d’oeuvres reflecting the local culinary pallet.

group of drupal developers around a large table, it is a selfie pic
https://twitter.com/rouvenvolk/status/835173696658604034

Plan D also had a reserved room awaiting us in a bar atop a hotel where I learned many after parties have been thrown by the national opera and symphony, which are only a few blocks away.  Aside from a helicopter ride I can’t imagine a better perspective on seeing the city lit up in the cold northern dark.

Night view of the Reykjavik skyline
Reykjavik at night

The final piece of Plan D was the wonderful surprise that all the Saturday sessions had been reorganized and we were still going on the sightseeing trip, minus the power plant tour since they do not give those on the weekend.  Capping the first night was a local rock band at a coffee shop and a late night hot dog with fried onions and brown mustard.  If there is a better way to serve a hot dog I have not encountered it.

Saturday brought a snow flurry that started as I walked from my hostel to the venue, about 3km away.  It ended when I was a block from the University of Iceland’s Oddi School of Business and I was completely white from head to toe with snow.  I was not the only one.  Even with the slipperiness of the sidewalks and the windy route that google maps suggested I arrived just in time for the opening remarks.

Lunch was served at the RÚV (Icelandic National Broadcast Service) cafeteria. It was a traditional preserved whitefish lunch.  The Drupal Viking told us all that this exact menu was a staple on a Saturday for his entire life. More reliable than the sun coming up.  We were very well fed and then got a quick tour and heard an awesome presentation (detailed below in Sessions).

7 people around a table with trays of food, iceland skyline in background
https://twitter.com/YesCT/status/835467173871161344

We then boarded 2 very large tour buses and away we went to see the continental divide, which is the original location of their parliament, Althing. An Icelandic flag marks where the Speaker of the Law would have to stand to deliver the rule to the people a millennia ago.

It snowed on us the entire time we were off the bus but immediately cleared to a beautiful day as we continued on towards the geysers.  We stopped for about an hour at some of the most beautiful waterfalls I have ever seen, Gullfoss.

Gullfoss waterfall, large powerful river guching waterfall over cliff
Gullfoss https://twitter.com/BryanGullan/status/835550459201011712

See some awesome drone footage from Spillebeen Mathieu here:  https://www.skypixel.com/share/video/iceland-golden-tour

The next stop was the original Icelandic Geysir. This is the original one where we get the word geyser from.  Geothermal hot springs contain a large amount of sulfur.  This means that all the hot water in the country, including these 95deg (Celsius) and hotter pools and eruptions smelled like rotten eggs, tinting the landscape a yellowish brown.  Still it was an amazing natural phenomenon to behold.

a geyser erupting
https://twitter.com/BryanGullan/status/835567905639116800

As the sun set we found our way to a place that specializes in artificial light, an organic green house tomato farm, Friðheimar.  Iceland offers some of the world’s cheapest energy and they were putting it to good use at Friðheimar.  One ton of tomato per day are produced in this facility that is in constant sunlight using hydroponics and imported bumblebees.

The meal was a fresh tomato soup and if all tomato soup tasted like that I would be eating a lot more of it.  It was served with very hearty breads and coffee or tea.  I capped my meal off with some tomato ice cream with tomato based toppings. We were scheduled to stay for a much longer time to enjoy the facility and the adjacent horse farm, but again the snow had started and the drivers where concerned with road conditions.

Drupal devs eating together in front of hanging tomato plants in a greenhouse
https://twitter.com/baddysonja/status/835594346648989696/photo/1

Arriving back in the city very late at night made me decide to call it a night and I walked home with the largest snowflakes I maybe have ever seen floating down.

Sunday morning I awoke to the record snows and a city infrastructure overwhelmed with the historic accumulation. Having travelled as far as I had and connecting so strongly with my peers, I was determined to make it to the event.  Most of the way I was able to walk in the middle of the street in the tire tracks left from the few cars that did manage to stay mobile overnight.  The snow ceased as I walked but I kicked up a lot of drift in my trouncing though knee high snow on the not yet shovelled paths of the university campus.  It was incredible to be alone with so much snow and the rising sun.

a trail through 51cm high snow, I am standing on the steps of a building looking to the north
My path through the snow

Plan D had to be abandoned since the unexpected blizzard made it impossible for most attendees to make it on time.  There were a few other plans was told had been attempted and failed so far, so we went with Plan Z.  A newly jostled schedule allowed the coffee people some extra time to arrive, a late start time and slightly shorter sessions with no breaks between.  It allowed us to get it all packed in.  Fortunately, lunch was served by the university cafeteria and the buildings are all connected by underground tunnels.  We didn’t even have to put our coats back on to comfortably stroll to lunch. We had Lasagne, salad and what I assume were vegetable protein potato nuggets.  Whatever they where, they were delicious with the sweet chili sauce they served.  Baddy even played some wonderful accompaniment.

Baddy Breidert playing piano
A musical lunch experience

Plan Z also included another surprise, an expedition was planned for that night to go to try and see the northern lights.  Again paid for by the conference and free to attend by us all.  Unfortunately nature did not cooperate with us and we had to return to town and say our goodbyes without having experienced the Aurora Borealis, but the joy of being together and seeing the vividly clear stars in the freezing night sky made the trip worth every second.

overexposed picture of the night sky with hundreds and hundreds of stars visible
https://twitter.com/BryanGullan/status/835998861239939073

By happenstance the returning bus route drove directly in front of my hostel and I wasn’t able to say goodbye to everyone in the commotion of departing.  It sure was nice not having to walk further in the snow on uneven icy ground as I had done previous nights.

The Sessions

The changing plans meant that day one only had 5 total sessions to make room for the tour. Baddy and Hilmar (perhaps better known as DrupalViking), our 2 camp organizers, kicked things off with a slide showing all the different countries who were represented.  This immediately set this camp apart from almost any other event I have ever attended aside from maybe DrupalCon Barcelona.  We celebrated our diversity right from the start and it carried through until the last goodbyes.

23 countries listed on a screen
https://twitter.com/allisonmanley/status/835424279357435905

The Keynote:

Johanna Bergmann from Amazee gave us a very good insight into how she came into the Drupal space.  Not from a development perspective but, like me, from a business one.  Her revelation that these agency owners openly shared their trade secrets went against everything she had thought was necessary to maintain a competitive advantage.  She soon discovered that this was a real ‘cooperative advantage’ in this community of people that were building the very tool they were basing their businesses on.  She said the thing that made this community work was our string ethics, guided by our code of conduct.  I have never heard this point articulated better and it really set the tone for the rest of our time together in sessions and in hallway conversations.

Johanna Bergmann delivering a talk in front of a whiteboard
https://twitter.com/thejimbirch/status/835438936180785161

The theme of cooperation really shone though the next session I saw. Allison Manley delivered a brilliant talk on the kickoff meeting with a client.  Clear and easy to follow, she laid out the steps they take at Palantir to set expectations and deliver projects. She really focused on how to communicate clearly with multiple stakeholders to be able to get the best results on what are sometimes very complex matters.  Some solid takeaways for all folks working on client facing teams.

Alison Manley in front of a screen that says Manage Expectations
https://twitter.com/McDwayne/status/835443569234169856

The third session was delivered by Helgi Páll Þórisson, the lead developer at RÚV who had implemented Drupal 6, which had replaced a proprietary and outdated CMS.  Rather than just laying out the technical specs of what they had done the presentation really highlighted the journey the team had taken to get to success.  We all shared their pain as he recounted that on the initial launch day, with the VP of the network standing behind DrupalViking, they had to try and restart Apache servers and inadvertently taking down everything.  But they persisted. And now are one of the largest companies in Iceland to use Drupal.  It was a real treat at a DrupalCamp to hear these types of stories from an internal development perspective as opposed to an agency delivery one.

A man giving a talk in front of old televisions
https://twitter.com/McDwayne/status/835479436417974273

Day 2 had too many awesome talks to write about them all.  The augmented schedule and some  actually prevented me from seeing everything I wanted to see but what I saw was awesome.  In the interest of content length I am only going to write about 4

Mike Miles‘ talk ‘Inclusive Design: Thinking beyond accessibility’ was a great way to start day 2.  The biggest take away was that ‘if you design for average, you design for no one.’  He told the story of the air force having a failing jet program due to user issues and not being able to sort out why.  It wasn’t until engineers focused on the extreme size difference between the tallest pilots and the shortest ones that they came up with adjustable seats and the user issues were greatly reduced.  By focusing on the limitations and designing for that, we can expect to have better results for everyone.  One of my favorite links he shared was the BBC’s standards to make their content more accessible: http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/futuremedia/technical/semantic_markup.shtml

Mike standing in front of a whiteboard witht he title of the talk on the screen
https://twitter.com/McDwayne/status/835793156742459392

Janne Koponen brilliant talk ‘Holistic development and operations environment’ was less about operations and more about ‘The Wunder Process’ was uplifting and invigorating.  Starting with the concept of ‘the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts’ thinking, Wunder believes that small process improvements, no matter how marginal, add up to large improvements.  They mirrors Toyota’s continual process improvement mechanisms.  He said Toyota gets about a million process improvement suggestions from employees per year and nearly 90% are implemented.  The results are a much more efficient overall machine.  Focus on the parts of the process and you will get the larger goals you are working towards.

Janne Koponen in front of a whiteboard
https://twitter.com/McDwayne/status/835821977826897920

My session went over well and I am very proud to say it was the most international crowd to which I have ever spoken.  10 people in the room represented 6 different nationalities and all sorts of backgrounds.  Some of my humor fell a little flat I think due to language and poplar culture limitations across borders.  It was a good reminder to me that not everyone has seen as much American television as I have.  The crowd went along with my requests to actually do some improv exercises at the end.  There was a interesting twist that almost no one participating natively spoke the same language though their English was impeccable.  Still, we managed to end up with many smiles and new techniques to break the ice for teams and to engage with clients in a fun yet meaningful way.

Wes Ruvalcaba talk ‘Virtual Reality on the Web – Introduction and How’ brought us into the world of VR and showed me for the first time, the possibilities of WebVR.  While I was nominally familiar with the concept of virtual reality over the internet it wasn’t until this talk that the development side of that work came into focus.  He showed us his code for some pretty interesting demos of VR using A-FRAME a Mozilla project with some very straightforward notation.  Next time the conversation of ‘what do we do as a CMS after websites’ comes up, I will have some very handy facts to cite.

Wes behind his computer
https://twitter.com/McDwayne/status/835858107955884032

Jim Birch ended the planned sessions on Sunday with Holistic SEO and Drupal, which is about a day and a half long workshop’s worth of SEO tips and tricks delivered in just over 35 minutes.  A literal blur of information was delivered and as you can see from his slides, dozens of links were shared that each needs its own exploration and study.  Holistic SEO is not something I spend too much of my time thinking on, but I walked away with some realizations and some next steps to improve my own small projects.

Jim in front of a whiteboard and a screen with his talk title
https://twitter.com/McDwayne/status/835886092247306242

Baddy and DrupalViking wrapped up the day and we celebrated making this camp happen.  They said when they first planned this, in their minds maybe 30 people would attend.  In the end 95 people from 25 different countries assembled and bonded over the worst snow in many years, the freezing cold and our renewed sense of purpose that we are in fact creating something bigger than the sum of the parts.  Namely Drupal.
Currently there is no plan to have a DrupalCamp Northern Lights 2018.  It is a good thing that #DCNLights 2017 was enough fun for multiple years!

All the attendees on the stairs at Ruv
https://twitter.com/DrupalIceland/status/836572434115473408

 

SANDCamp 2017: It rained, there were many doughnuts, and a good time was had by all

My second trip of 2017 was my first Drupal event of the year and my first speaking sessions of the year for San Diego for SANDCamp.  Held in the very beautiful Marina Village right on the water, we had a pretty amazing backdrop for 3 days of learning and sharing.
SANDCamp Logo: Drupal on the Beach

boats in a marina blue sky some clouds
https://twitter.com/cspin/status/833012055279968258

Thursday was training days and I didn’t get to go to those. Pantheon was having a function with about 100 of us in the SF office at once.  The company is about 45% distributed so this was a very big deal for us all.  I stayed with my co-workers for as long as I could, but got to San Diego in time to set up our booth and be ready to go Friday morning.

Pantheon booth set up at SANDCamp
https://twitter.com/McDwayne/status/832624423551135745

THE FOOD AND THE FUN:

Friday morning brought with it many breakfast choices.  There were awesome doughnuts from my fellow sponsors Sagetree Solutions and Achieve Internet.  SANDCamp provided warm bagel sandwiches and plenty of regular bagels with accoutrements.  Coffee came by way of San Diego’s own award winning Dark Horse Coffee Roasters.   Some of the best cold brew iced coffee I have ever had.
Dark Horse Coffee logo, horse in a suit and tie.
Lunch was the standard fare box lunch sandwich, chips, cookies and fruit with some pizzas ordered to cover any gaps.  SANDCamp stands out to me not for the food itself but the fact we all sat together in one room and the Keynotes were delivered for us while we ate our lunch.  More on those amazing sessions later.

crowd of people at sand camp eating lunch, picture taken from balcony looking down
https://twitter.com/lukeherrington/status/832688475333726209

Friday evening we had catered food truck tacos and nachos served with plenty of local beers and wines.  Many awesome conversations and it was pretty convenient to just go from the last session of the day straight to hanging out and pouring a drink. This was super nice because it was pouring rain outside with some very fierce winds pounding down on us. Many locals and the news told me this was the worst storm in many years. Staying dry and eating tacos was pretty awesome.

A bottle of Alpine Beer, Duet in front of a computer displaying drupal.org page
https://untappd.com/user/Toddrink/checkin/418354560?ref=social

Breakfast and lunch on Saturday copied the previous day but the after party most certainly did not.  We were hosted at the pretty hip and hopping Wonderland Ocean Pub.   The place was very lively, as we were not the only people who wanted to party after their weekend event. A large Rugby tournament was happening simultaneous to SANDCamp and we shared the bar.  While it make it noisy and a tad crowded, we got reasonable service and many awesome drink tokens.  When I come back to San Diego I am for sure returning here to get more of the coconut calamari. It was a fantastic way to cap a great event.

group of Drupal people drinking beer and waving at camera
https://twitter.com/tatewaky/status/833142894349283328

 

THE SESSIONS:

Unfortunately, due to time constraints I was not able to see as many of the talks as I would have liked.  But the ones I did see were great!  Here is my wrap up of the ones that stood out from the ones I saw.

Two years of Backdrop CMS
Jen Lampton and Nate Haug gave a couple talks but I was only able to attend one, their two year retrospective of BackDrop CMS.  I have heard a variation of this talk before, but as more of a general ‘Why Backdrop’ discussion, which had inspired me to experiment with this Open Source fork of Drupal.  It is exciting to see how far the project has come and I was surprised by the number of contributors they reported.  I also learned that contributing has some very nice benefits, they would be happy to tell you more.  Very well done and the fact that Jen and Nate are two of the nicest people in the world made this a good time.

Jen and Nate from Backdrop giving a presentation to a room full of people
https://twitter.com/McDwayne/status/832720565307740161

Know Thyself or Perish
Robert Manigold’s session really had two key takeaways from me.  I learned a very sharp and succinct reply to the reaction ‘that seems expensive.  That reply is “Expensive to who?”.  I have not heard this before but I will be using this moving forward. It immediately changes the conversation from one about a price point to one of worldview and if this product is even the right fit for them.  The other major take away is the claim that only four (4) pricing strategies make a profit: Luxury, Premium, Low Cost and Ultra Low Cost. Robert explained that everything in between will self select out and end up with friction with mismatched customers in the process.  This seems like a bold statement to me, but the further I think about it the more correct this seems.  When confronted with ‘there needs to be a price in between’ I am going to start exploring which bucket the client really wants to be in and how we can help accommodate that to make everyone happier.

Robert standing in front of a screen that says Self Examination
https://twitter.com/McDwayne/status/832735560812765184

Man vs. Machine: Successful Client/Vendor Communications
I am guessing you have heard he phrase ‘signal to noise’ ratio a number of times in your life.  I know I have. But I have never before seen this represented in such a clear and straightforward fashion that on this single diagram from James Smith:

diagram showing cycle of communication and various points where noise can interfere with transmission and receiving infoThere are so many places where communication can get disrupted or poorly transmitted it is almost absurd we communicate as well as we do.  This talk was fantastic in revealing that not only must we strive for clearer expression of our ideas but we must also follow through to confirm that delivery, and maybe more importantly, comprehension has occurred. The Q&A had many insights from the crowd and was one of my favorite exampled of how we can learn from each other at these sessions.

James Smith standing in front of a screen that says Man vs Machine
https://twitter.com/McDwayne/status/832999957988716547

MY TALKS:

I had the extreme honor of having 3 of my talks accepted at SANDCamp.  Two were talks I have previously given: ‘We Are All Making This Up: Improv Lessons For Developers‘ and ‘Pricing Strategy and Tactics For Agencies‘. One though, was created and delivered just for SANDCamp: ‘Every project is a story: Applying storytelling to your client interactions‘
I gave the Storytelling talk first and to a full room which really helped the energy of my talk.  There is a tremendous power to leveraging The Story Spine, defined by Kenn Adams, to translate any client or other request into a cohesive narrative. We think in stories and being able to help other people realize their thoughts in a more articulate and prescribed fashion is key to meeting their needs with great results.  You can find my slides here I was really grateful for the feedback and there is a bit of tuning and tweaking to do but based on the reception here I really look forward to given this talk again.

Me in front of a slide that shows the story spine applied to a story arc graph
Special thanks to @that1dood https://twitter.com/CodeKoalas/status/833017700670590976

The pricing talk (slides here) is the one that is specifically targeted to the  exact audience of freelancers and new agencies that are just starting to grow.  Having established business owners in the room and some non-business side folks led to some interesting discussions.  My biggest take away on this talk was I need to tighten it up to leave more room for discussion.  Coming right after a keynote that sparked a lively discussion on the identity and marketing of Drupal, there was a palpable sense of conversation in the Q&A where we were really learning from each other.
My improv talk is my most accepted talk by various camps yet and the one were I feel I have the least imposter syndrome.  I have been doing improv for 7 years now, over twice as long as I have been in the Drupal or WordPress communities.  I had a smaller but highly engaged group that went right along with the exercises and gave some very positive feedback.  You can find the slides, previous video and a whole blog series I wrote about it from here.  I learned a few things myself and will be incorporating a few more ‘applied’ games when I next deliver this (which will be in Iceland)

While it was pretty rad to give three talks, they were all scheduled for Saturday.  I can safely say that giving multiple talks in a single day is exhausting and might have affected quality of delivery by the end.  I think if I face this situation again in the future I will ask for some additional spacing between talks.   Still very grateful to have the opportunity to contribute to the conversations.

Keynotes:

There were two keynotes at SANDCamp.  As I mentioned before these were delivered while all the attendees ate lunch in the same place, at the same time.  This created a super connected feeling among the attendees, sharing the larger discussions that spawned from these topics.
Friday Todd Ross Nienkerk, CEO and co-founder of Four Kitchens talked about the Future of the CMS.  I felt he gave a pretty good summary of why we need to think in decoupled architectures for better client experience.  I have heard multiple talks about this subject from a wide range of speaker but the thoughtfulness of Todd’s comments and slides really made this sink in for a few of the folks I spoke with.  Making this even more remarkable was Todd stepped up literally at the last minute to do this talk as a replacement for Darin Andersen, who’s fight was cancelled due to the unusual weather conditions.  I am sure his talk would have been awesome as well, but Todd’s was outstanding.

Todd from four kitchens in front of a screen that says the future of the CMS
https://twitter.com/McDwayne/status/832685810264584192

Saturday we got to hear our regularly scheduled speaker Tom McCracken from LevelTen give the highlights and insights he garnered from the great 2016 LevelTen Roadshow.  His slides and comments reminded me much of my own journeys around this country and all the great communities I have had the pleasure of participating in.  Tom shared his observations that indeed there is much to learn from other communities such as WordPress; a sentiment shared by a growing number of thought leaders, echoed by the likes of Josh Koenig just a week prior at LoopConf.
The Q&A session of Tom’s talk turned into lively discussion on the future of Drupal itself.  There are very few moments I can point to where a group that large was fully engaged in such an open, honest and thoughtful discussion.  This topic was on everyone’s tongue for the rest of the day and well into the awesome party.  There are no easy answers to what we need to do as an industry next, but if we can keep sharing our experiences and thoughts in such a civilized discourse, I for one think that the future looks fairly bright.

Tom in front of a screen, too much backlight to see what is on the screen
https://twitter.com/McDwayne/status/833048535155167232

Synchronicity:

Aside from arriving for The-Storm-Of-The-Century-So-Far I also just happened to be in San Diego for the San Diego Improv Festival.  Dozens of my awesome improvisor friends from all over the country were in town doing that art form I love so much.  I had the extreme pleasure of getting to hang out with my people from Michigan, Utah, San Francisco, LA, Riverside and of course SD’s Finest City Improv.  I unfortunately didn’t get to see an actual improv show though since it was completely sold out, but with all the bits (which is all improvisors do) it felt like I was just part of one massive show.  This was the 4th time in my life my work travel just so happened to coincide with an improv festival, joining Sarasota, LA and Minneapolis.  It makes all the travel that much better since it feels like I have family all over the place.

Me and 2 other improvisors in front of a sign for San Diego Improv Festival
https://twitter.com/FinestCityImpro/status/833207732677152769

TO SUM UP:

SANDCamp was a blast and I am very glad I got to visit San Diego.  I am pretty sure it is an awesome city, but I didn’t get to go see too much of it this time around thanks to the rain and my time limitations.  What I did get to see was pretty awesome.    I feel very fortunate to have seen the sessions I did and got to be part of the larger conversation that really solidified around Saturday’s keynote.  The future of Drupal is not set in stone but we pretty much all agreed that this community and what we have accomplished so far is pretty special and awesome.