Tag: DrupalKaraoke

Design4Drupal 2018: Views from the top floor and walking further than we needed to while a good time was still had

I always consider The Olde Towne one of the iconic American cities. By this I mean that if I go to Serbia or Iceland and talk about cities in the US, people always know San Francisco, New York, LA and Boston. They have a picture in their heads, and with good reason, of some of the oldest buildings, some of the oldest bars and some of the more famous landmarks in this country. It was quite an honor to go be part of the magic of old bean town as I accepted the invitation to speak at Design4Drupal 2018.

Food and Fun

Wednesday

Coffee and snacks and tea were still being set up when I first arrived. But when I finally was able to get some coffee it was actually pretty good for college catering. I think that because there was an open Starbucks in the building they knew they should step up their game. Lunch time rolled around and us special meals folks were treated extremely well. I had a pretty amazing ‘Cobb’ salad with beets and avocado. Even the afternoon snacks had a vegan section what was more than just fruit.

There was no official party or goings on on the first night. This let me catch up with some of my favorite Drupal community members who also didn’t have official other plans. We found a BBQ joint with a reasonable set of veg options and a great mixologist on staff, The Smoke Shop.

Thursday

Very much a repeat of the previous day. Again huge props to the organizing team who really looked out for us with dietary restrictions. Very notable fact, the catering thought that small whole cakes would be a good decision for some reason as snack. I got a good chuckle out of that.

After Party

We gathered at Meadhall in Cambridge for a very fun evening of snacks and beverages and fellowship as a community. No tweets that actually showed the party and the venue in full swing can be found, so here is a sample tweet about the venue.

Yes, we also found some time to do DrupalKaraoke. THanks to the good people of Courtside for letting us celebrate area man’s birthday with y’all.

Friday

Friday was Sprints and Training Day. We had coffee and snacks abounding and lunch even offered up vegan pizza and a pretty healthy salad option.

Sessions

Opening Remarks

10 Vital Lessons For Running A Successful Digital Agency
MaryAnn Pfeiffer

MaryAnn is the kind of shop owner I hope other shop owners are paying attention and learning from. This talk is a no-nonsense look at very practical aspects of running a business. I really loved her approach of laying out the advice, then explaining how she came be believe this and the data behind it. I highly recommend this one if you are running a business of any kind.

Raw Notes:
Her 4th year here
goal is to help save you some time and effort and void mistakes she has learned the hard way
not a coder, pre-internet marketing
marketing communications
personal intro and polling audience
1. Begin with the end in mind
lawyers are better on the way in than on the way out
making sure you get paid for your work and work is not stolen
keep things professional
she learned from a client she had been working with for years
her work was stolen by an advisory board, went to court
2 years
another client who had signed a contract
only took 2 months to get paid
another client wanted to change the contract too much
had to say no
all had to say Attorney and they backed off
even her mom needs to sign a contract if she wanted work
2. Friends can be clients but they are customers first in that case
Specific lens of friendship is bad for business
Clients can make really good friends though
as long as professional lens is there
3. Think long term
don’t just take any project that comes along
you will regret taking bad fits into your portfolio
strapped for cash, will take about anything
Client relationship is a 2 way street
4. Brainpower should cost money
don’t give free consulting advice
your knowledge and time are real assets
been doing this 17 years
for first 10 years did a lot of unpaid consulting time
now has a ‘pick your brain’ paid consulting
written report or other deliverable around advice
5. Realize there is strength in numbers
invest in financial tools and advisors to grow your business
She hired a person to handle finances and accountant much smoother
6. Be a work in progress.
Sooner you start documenting and process management the better
project manager came in and had no idea how to start
all process was in people’s heads, not written down
took weeks to document
had to define the processes
7. business is business
No one is a one person shop
we all have to use outside vendors
choose those vendors wisely
seemed easy to just get friends and ‘down the street’ convenient
but not always a fit
now she has stable of vendors who are trusted and provide real value
referrals must be because of business fit
8. No I in Team
working with partners who can keep your relationship secure
had a server fail, hosting company
known them for year, bad luck run on his part
multi day outage
80% of her sites were down
headache and really should have been end of business event
she was prioritized as a client but still the end clients wanted to migrate hosts
but they all still trusted her
chose Pantheon cause we care
Fiery hoops and made sure the clients were satisfied
(Great job Roxanne!)
9. Transparency leads to trust
clients depend on you but you depend on them
must help each other get better
took her a while to be really transparent
tough position to be in if you agree to do work you don’t know how to do
instead figuring out if can do, otherwise refer them
want them to be a happy client so they trust long term for things they are competent
10. Every little thing, going to be alright
can’t force them to jump though
can be frustrating, you have to just let it go
business is not personal and you need to let go of ego

Wednesday Keynote

The Building Blocks Of The Indie Web
Jeremy Keith

I didn’t go into this talk expecting it to be as technical as it was, but wow I am very glad I went in with an open mind. I left with a much better understanding of what is even possible around owning your own content and how it all fits to make a better overall internet. It is not the responsibility of large corporations to protect your content and privacy, it is yours. Things like OAtuh and ‘rel me’ might seem like technical novelties, but what they represent, if embraced, mean a much freer internet where a content creator decides on when and how their content is used in a more meaningful way than using FB, Twitter, etc, could ever allow. This is also a very entertaining talk in my opinion with some of the better thought through slides I have seen in a while. They don’t work stand alone but amplify his talk when he is going through them.

Raw Notes:
indieweb.org
Owning your content going forward
Ideally Capitalism good
bell curve distribution
in theory it could be economically good
if a level playing field
Rich get richer and poor get poorer due to feedback loops
Internet explorer
wants to see many browsers competing on features
dodged a bullet
routed around it, like networks
hub and spoke
airports still use this, old telephone
single point of failure
ARPANET
well connected nodes distributed network
still possible for network to work even if one goes away
military background survive nuclear attack
but really people working on it thought
nuclear weapons with hub and spoke
reduced the possibility
shared with the Russians
no top down and nodes can add in as needed
no permissions on the WWW to create a new URL or link
no planned structure
wild crawling mess
walled gardens – Compuserve and AOL
the web Won!
wanted free open
but returned to walled gardens like Facebook, Twitter, etc
FB is media company in the world but we make all the content for them
the better the network
the first person who had a fax machine had a completely useless device
before FB it was a singular social
basically pushed us back to the hub and spoke model
hypothetical, an election
single point of failure
like WP and Drupal are popular and get attacked more
temping target, large attack vector
Why?
Convenience is driving it
trade control for this convenience
they now control your content
the movement tries to balance that
indieweb, you should have your own website
longevity
MySpace
link rot is a fact of life
comes back to the architecture of the web
proposal to hypertext conference in 1991
rejected
2 directional links
one directional links
but 2 direction isn’t that hard
link rel=
href
rel stands for relationship
works on a as well
a rel=
a rel=me
but that does not make 2 direction though right?
spec element on profile links
kind of 2 directional
relme auth
piggyback OAuth
can sign in to a service using your own website
why would you even do this?
authentication is the hardest point of an API
micropub – incoming post requests
you can use anyone else’s interface that conforms to this standard
quill
ownyourgram
ownyourswarm
PESOS
publishing elsewhere send to own site
but POSSE is better
Post own send somewhere else
using ITTT for ths
Webmention another W3C standard
brid.gy is a service on these things
monitoring responses and can ping you and push to you by authenticating
can do comment but also do interesting things with the data
facepile
plugins available
works for Drupal as well
but why? why this?
Dri.es/tag/open-web
should all be different whys
but it is about control of our media
but this is all about tech
but that is not what indieweb is about
it is about design principals
indieweb.org/principles
have to have fun!
emoji included
your site is your playground
the original motto of the World Wide Web was: “let’s share what we know.”

How Technical Should A Drupal PM Be?
Matthew O’Bryant

I do a fair amount of thinking about Project Management since I talk to so many people who work on projects. I also see that as an appealing career path to be honest, as it is something that gets things done and in an ideal world, unites folks for the better. Matthew does a pretty good job of reality checking anyone that might be approaching this field lightly. He systematically walked through terms and concepts that PMs of any skill level should be mastering and at least familiar with. The final answer of “how technical” is ultimately “it depends”, as with so many other things in life. However, knowing more and continually learning is certainly a good approach no matter what.

Raw Notes:
Long history of CS sales and technical background around sales and marketing
bought a home loan automation, learned coding and architecture
Dreamweaver, ASP
20 years of this stuff
Digital Project Manager
success
I think in 1’s and 0’s but I speak English
Does it even matter
Main role is
hit deadlines
manage a budget
resource coordination
quality control
client satisfaction
Answer is yes, it matters
carpenter using a hammer vs making a blueprint
actual answers, it depends, on quality of the project
small sites maybe less important
even some medium, depends on what you need to integrate, maybe great contrib modules
maybe less to explain
maybe more technical
support SLA
Endurance vs Stress test
eCommerce
more complex you need to have a better technical understanding and be able to translate it
knowing terminology
adding content
basic HTML and CSS editing
Basic understanding of Views
intermediate skills
paragraphs, pathauto
admin toolbar
many more
know your basic contrib modules
Drupal permissions
views config
commerce features attributes
so you can have the conversation with the clients
version control for Configuration Management
Module configurations
more advanced things
know git
ACESSABILITY IS KEY
W3C WCAG 2.0
Perceivable Information and UI
Operable User Interface and Navigation
Understandable Information & UI
Robust content and reliable interpretation
Peer code review
Cross Browser Testing
Performance Testing
Security and Penetrative Testing
Google Analytics
Google Tag Manager
Heat Mapping Tools
LOT OF STUFF
improve your skills
Build your own website

Storybook: An Interactive Pattern Library for Your Decoupled Applications
Brian Perry

Brian is an excellent presenter and this talk is a continuation of an idea I first heard him discuss at Midcamp. Now, I will always caveat that front end stuff always seems a little out of my wheelhouse, as I don’t really touch that side of things in my day to day. However, this adds a bit of magic show element to any of these talks where I just get to be impressed a thing is possible without fully grasping how it does it’s thing. ‘Knobs’, for instance, seems like a completely logical tool anyone would want to use for making fast changes when prototyping or developing but I can’t point to a single thing on my agenda to have a reason to dive into it at the moment. Still, I am very grateful to get to attend these talks and expand my knowledge base around this area. You never know what tomorrow will bring or when I am going to need to need this stuff. It was a very good demo.

Raw Notes:
Atomic design approach
Atoms -> molecules ->Organisms -> Templates -> Pages
build components and prototype them
integrate with Drupal in interesting ways
test things before you integrate fully
can be Twig
Examples:
Artsy.net
on github as well
website in github
bulk is in React
slide shows, galleries, ect
reaction is the folder you want
Another example
Uber React-Vis
visual storybook focused on components for visualization
JSX add on
knobs
Adding Storybook to a project
npx create-react-app my-app
cd my-app
npx -P @storybook/cli getstorybook
npm run storybook
starts a localhost instance site
going to be pretty bare bones but that is scaffolding
Individual story files
config.js file
iterates through options and pull in what you want
example story: Album
Music discovery app
Row with an album cover, name, render method to render JSX
select album function
src/componets/Album.stories.js
import React
import {storiesOf}
import { Album }
import { AlbumList }
CODE EXAMPLES
Album story
Addon: Actions
Can see a lot of things
log the actions and functions
with Knobs you can fiddle with things in real time to experiment before committing
Lot of demo!
List View story
Combine all this with Puppeteer to test all the things
deploying is straightforward as well
build to a .out directory
or NPM script
and can post that anywhere with static JS bundles
Drupal and Pattern Lab?
style guide guide, gatsby edition
the storefront in the workshop
really is a dev tool

5 Essential Lessons You Can Learn From Art History
Jennifer Smith

I’ll admit it, I didn’t fully read the session description before I got there and thought we were going to be looking at classical architecture, painting and sculpture from all throughout history. Instead we started in 1900 and I quickly got acquainted with the importance of The Bauhaus and Swiss Design and how we can all benefit in our daily choices from embracing simplicity over needless ornate embellishments. I also learned how to quickly apply the Golden Ratio to a layout without a lot of hassle, which I am going to start leveraging as design choices pop up. TL;DR – centering is the lazy way to show you don’t know about design, so stop centering everything and flat is better than drop shadows.

Raw Notes:
There is design in everything
If you follow best practices
looks more professional
takes stress away
impresses others
don’t make your company look bad
10 minute art history
Early 1900’s
could go back further but this is modern era
Emphasis on tech
manufacturing process and function
style subordinated to purpose
Electricity comes around
have to design things to use it
like fans and such Peter Behars
tea kettle
unified appearances
glass walls was a super big innovation
reason behind every component and decision
Van de Velde
trained as a painter
served as an architect, designer, teacher
jewelry and other common things
furniture
first real silverware sets
art to industry as well
German Association of Craftsmen
form determined by function
elimination of all ornament
elevated functional aesthetic
1918 war ends and design things ramp up in post war
1919 Bauhaus school
to this day still think German Engineering is good because of this
free to people who qualified, school just for designers
building for a soft machine, humans
Bauhaus became a philosophy
eliminate elements that do not matter
form follows function
everything is designed
make design accessible, avoid overloading and over stylizing
Craigslist is EVERYTHING at once, Google is one thing, done well
1933 Nazis killed the Bauhaus
1940’s Swiss Design
after exit from Germany, kind of makes sense
not specific to Swiss, but international style
flair for design forever there though
international typographic style
this is used by all large corporations now
Used Asymmetric layout
and GRIDS FOR EVERYTHING!
sans-serif
Flush left, ragged right
preference for photos over illustration
Dieter Rams, less is more
record player
Braun juicer
inspired by that juicer, Apples products in the 90s
10 principals list
Less is more!
don’t give the user more than they ask for
focus on needs not distractions
fierce reduction of elements
United vs American Airlines apps
United has a lot of unneeded parts when you first look
new flat design is actually just the swiss style
shiny is not needed
Windows 10 no rounded corners, grid
LingsCars.com best site about what not to do with design
how to eliminate unneeded objects?
Do you really need this in a box (boarders are a sign of weakness)
Does this need a drop shadow (most likely no)
Does it help to have this in 3D
does the gradient convey more information?
BWI is actually on the right path
but there is a video on their desktop site that takes a lot of space
mobile apps are cleaner
Using mind maps, helps figure out what is important before design work begins
don’t give people sloppy stuff
Eye pattern testing showed no real difference between serif and sans-serif
on-screen considerations
Xheiht 65% of the Cap height
strong counters
do not use Script or Cursive
use a typographic grid
Always adhere to type ramp
visually 2X the size so people can see the import stuff
Rule of thirds
Golden ratio
Fibonacci sequence based on rabbit research
very replicated in nature
multiple by 1.62 for a perfect pleasing size rectangle
helps to not center everything
PhiMatrix
can overlay Golden Ratio on your screen over anything
and break down proportions as needed, repeatedly
Google Materials
https://design.google/

Thursday Keynote

Exploring the New Drupal Front-end with JavaScript
Dries

I always love a good Driesnote and was a bit curious how this would stack up. A visibly more relaxed Dries, in front of a smaller crowd than DrupalCon brings, really had a conversation with us and introduced several members of the audience to the history of Drupal for the first time. More importantly than our past, it was great to hear an impassioned view of the future and what that can look like. Not too dissimilar from WordPress, the take away for me is embracing JavaScript on the presentation layer is not optional anymore, so it is up to us to make sure our testing frameworks and APIs are up for it. Especially in a world where every new dev is at least learning JS basics, it is going to make adopting Drupal even easier int he future and will let us draw from a much larger pool of devs to grow the community.

Raw Notes:
History of JS, Drupal, API-First, JavaScript-driven Drupal admin interface
Brief history of JS across the stack
JS was invented in 10 days
Brendan Eich wrote the first JS version
in the beginning everyone thought it was amateurs
JS was not cool at first
XML
asynchronous JS
lead to AJAX
then frameworks like JQuery, dojo, mootools prototype
adopted by Drupal, first CMS to use JQuery
put it on the map
2008, Chrome build JS engine V8
10 years ago, they were very future looking
10x performance improvement over internet explorer with V8
2010, twitter made unprecedented move,
implemented new API server for everything/everyone
Moved the rendering to the user’s browser
model is common now, but this was a first
over capacity whale showed that this initially did not do well
time to first interaction was pretty poor
had to download a lot of things
in 2012 partial rollback of rendering back to the server
AIRBNB made the code very reusable
JS word right now, Babel, nightwatch
tooling has really evolved
History of Drupal
message board for his friends
registered dorp, means village
typo to drop.org, happy accident
thought up public name for code, 30 seconds. Thought of Drupal
Google and Mobile had no real existence
1 our of 40 sites on the internet use Drupal
14 million visits to drupal.org per year
reinvented ourselves many times
each morning we are born again, what we do today matters most
slow start on D8 after release
but getting better
51% increase in D8 adoption last year
REST API first initiative
Drupal’s REST support is pretty good, rich and mature
user logging/reg, media,
JSON API and GraphQL
pretty robust, moving them into core
pretty close
maybe in 8.6
more and more companies designing API first
Chupachups UK, Warner Music, teach.org many, many others
people at sea using Drupal locally and syncing once back at shore
integrate with anything including other Drupal sites
NewBalance is ideal use of both traditional and decoupled
Working on JS-driven Drupal admin interface
Drupal’s own UI is still not JS first/forward
could be more interactive and better if we do embrace it
Drupal needs cutting edge experience
Trying to replace a single page, they identified 6 steps
1. stabilize the JSON API module, pretty close
2. Improve our JS testing infrastructure
3. Create designs for the administration UI
4. Allow contrib modules to use React or Twig
no big bang swap of whole UI, introduce more dynamic incrementally
not everything needs React, but want it when you do
5. Implementing missing web services APIs
like permissions, found gaps in coverage
Admin areas have some things that are only in that use case
6. Make the React UI extensible and configurable
Good news, this benefits EVERY decoupled builds
why should we care?
used to be you made a site and just left it alone
now people live in the frameworks like Drupal, always changing
Drupal is no longer the Drupal you used to know
it continues to evolve all the time
slides at https://dri.es

Iterative UX: Find It Cambridge Case Study
Benjamin Melançon

I was very curious on this talk what a Find It Cambridge even was. Turns out it is a resource that can greatly help any community better organize it’s events and resources. Benjamin is just the nicest guy as well, which never hurts a presentation. For instance he deferred to team members in the room who had worked on this this project with him for various sections, making it seem like their whole team was up there presenting and he was just a player in the larger picture. I have heard too many talks where this would not have happened, even though the team is literally in the room. It encourages me to think about these sort of opportunities to involve others in my sessions. I don’t actually think my notes on this one are that good, as I had a few distractions in this one, so this is a case study I would encourage you to just watch for yourself on youtube thanks to the hard work of Kevin Thull

Raw Notes:
must have a budget
an ongoing budget if not a large one
Research
iterate on what someone else has built
what another website does
issue is they want Google/FB/other expensive commercial site
find something similar to what you want to build and use the elements that work well
Sommerville pub was there to help them figure out what worked well
research showed more info was expected from a .org vs a .gov
that is changing in Mass thanks to mass.gov!
Resource Portal Interviews
Students from the school of public health reached out as part of a project to research with them and provide analysis
Testing other sites
You need content, you can not design without content
Google sheets originally,
then another content store was used
compare to other sites
see how buttons work well there
a wireframe allows us to experience design while implementing quickly in dev
Best 7 letters when talking to a designer or Developer
HTML
CSS
discontinuous Improvement
have to break and improve things
Go where your users are
use IE if they still use it at your user’s facilities
visualize everything
visual maps
Lessons learned from user testing
there were many
not including 141 programs that forgot to check themselves as All Ages
water play parks
seasonality or weather dependent results
more use cases
curated lists of things

Building a better page builder with Bootstrap Paragraphs
Jim Birch

Going to be very honest here. I originally went to see this because I wanted to support Jim giving the last session of the camp. I always love his talks but going in I had a fear my mind would wander and my notes would be pretty spotty. However, this is actually a really interesting area, even though front end. Jim’s presentation skills are second to none and his raw passion about this subject matter is infectious. At it’s core this is a talk about DRY and how to make everything reusable. This is a great lesson for anyone, not just front end folks.

Raw Notes:
Why?
Different widths for different content elements
better typography
wanting images
structured content
ability to add semantic markup
easy to administer
slide things around
Bootstrap framework – HTML and JS pre-configured
powers about 25% of the web as a front end
mobile first and responsive
Create grid markup and readable
documentation
standardization helps
on-boarding is easier
Customizable
completely
mixins for adding existing styles to semantic html
best practices for small/lo budget projects
get 80% there when you start
Open Source – MIT license
If already using Paragraphs
how many times have you repeated yourself
but a litttttle bit differently
install this modules and start exploring right ow
Strategy – create a module to give you want you need
create base templates and CSS that could be included with any Bootstrap include
harness the power of Entity Reference Revisions fields to neat Paragraphs
Have global width and color options
Inspiration – Les and David Needham’s great presentation using Paragraphs
they came out with idea of paragraphs as content paragraphs and layout paragraphs
and ponies
Global settings
Every paragraph should gave widths and backgrounds
list/text
widths
tiny/narrow/medium/wide/full
background colors
empty classes follow the standards for bootstrap conventions
Content bundles
layout bundles
image includes a link field
blank
embed JS or connect to mailchimp, Pardot, Eloqua, etc.
Drupal Blocks – render them in line with the other paragraphs
not everything works though
copy and extend for custom blocks
Views paragraph bundles, reference field, lets yo put a view into a paragraph, even with an argument
Columns
up to 6 pieces of content
distributes equally
two uneven columns 1/4s and 1/3s
3 uneven columns, it gets messy but possibilities are wide
column wrapper
another layer
carousel for those that like them
images and text, just no other carousel inside a carousel
slide interval speed settings
Accordion
collapsible
Modal – 4 fields – title, body, footer
Tabs like the accordion
tabs and accordions in a tab
2 Submodules
contact and webform
Contact form let’s you reference the content form entity
add new or use existing contact form
Webform, same thing but for Webform module
using Block element modifier markup
BEM
Markup – div.paragraph
modifiers
Twig – width example
Drupal asset libraries to apply styles
theme has hierarchy to the modules
module libraries folder
custom blocks
add fields
dropping in setting default
make your own content fields
manage display
Working globally
mostly config and a couple templates
packaged up in a module
thought was ‘how can this be reusable?’
does not want to rebuild again and again
create a module structure
Drupal console has a command that magically does this
add templates and CSS and JS
configure in the .libraries file
export the config
Just delete the UUIDs
Rename field_ to your own machine to avoid future collisions
if needed, add function to override template in .module
Bootstrap Pages module
article content type and an author and a landing page
meta tags and schema.org, optimized images, responsive, precofigured URLS
taxonomy
views
use frameworks to save time and be more productive
this is his attempt to do this
also can use this approach for any other framework
make it reusable

My Sessions

Nobody Wants a Website. They Want Results!

Discovery, discovery, discovery, discovery!

I got to talk at MIT! This is pretty exciting to me. I not only got to deliver 2 talks at this camp, which is cool into itself, but I also got to give two related talks that are part of a larger set of topics, which is the sales/project process. With ‘Nobody Wants a Website’ I focus on the qualification process and uncovering KPIs or at least what is measurable early. I got to follow that up a day later with ‘Discovery, discovery, discovery, discovery!’ and dig into what I think of as the most important part of the whole process. It was a really great feeling to give this ‘cycle’ of talks and I am guessing this is how Matthew Barney feels whenever they show all of Cremaster Cycle at once.

Sprints Day:

I always love a contribution day. The community coming together to make the project happen and evolve the state of things. I was very happy to get a chance to wrap my head around the Tour module, specifically the notion of leveraging routes and attributes. This is one of the more overlooked aspects of Core in my opinion and I look forward to being able to better get a grip on how to contribute back to the project moving ahead

Wrapping Up

I always will like Boston for the history, for the warm people if it is warm outside and for the pretty awesome Drupal community based out there. I am actually going to be headed back that way in the near future for another event. I am already looking forward to next year when I might again get a chance to speak at MIT in the shadow of the offices for the W3C, Stallman and Tim Berners-Lee at Design4Drupal 2019!

DrupalCon 2018: A little bit country and a whole lot of amazing conversations

Way back in 2014 I started working for Pantheon and at first it was just another gig, working in Open Source and selling a platform. Then I got sent to work the booth at this event in Austin, TX called DrupalCon. It was there that I met the users of the platform, the developers, face to face. It was there that I finally understood what it meant to be part of the Drupal community. Drupal events will always hold this extra special place in my heart which is way I was so darn excited to get to go to the SuperBowl of Drupal, DrupalCon 2018

This was the 2nd time in a year, and in my life, I had been to Music City USA. While a little more familiar, there was a ton left to explore and so much I have not yet gotten to do. I think the fact that the city was not as mysterious made this trip seem to fly by extra quick. From the time I land until I flew out felt like a few hours, not a few days. Lot to cover, so let’s rock it!

Food And Fun

Sunday Night

I landed and was immediately invited out for a night of good fun with the Drupal community. There were a lot of folks that rolled into town early to take advantage of the night life and sights of Nashville and it was like a whole ‘evening of hugs’ where we couldn’t walk too far without getting a hug from someone you had not seen in a while.

Monday

Coffee and tea and some high carb breakfast options were on hand as we started the day of training and Partner Day. Not terribly coffee but not great either. I opted for tea for the rest of the event after that first cup.
Lunch on day one had a very solid vegan option: tofu steaks, quinoa stuffed peppers and some pickled veggies on the side. Can’t find a picture of lunch options on Twitter, so here is
There was the Opening Reception for the sponsor area/main floor for the event with grits and other options. Since there was cheese in everything save the mushrooms, I found some crackers to munch on and a little fruit, but otherwise saved room for a the food at our Pantheon Team Dinner a little later that evening.
Monday night found me at the Pantheon team dinner, which happened at Pinewood Social, a super hip bowling alley/mixologist bar. I put a short hold on my ‘vodka+soda only’ approach and indulged in some good Tennessee whiskey. I carried this over from our team dinner to the official unofficial Drupal Bar Crawl, alo known as the DrupalCrawl. This year we crawled into HQ Beercade Nashville and many of us did not crawl anywhere else, given you could play most of the games for free, including one of the greatest games ever sponsored by a beer, Tapper which you can play here

Tuesday

This was the first full day of the conference and for me it started really early and I brought my own coffee. There was a coffee option but I didn’t see it til later in the day.
I had my hopes up for lunch and unfortunately the option for the catered line was not quite as stellar as the previous day. Though not too bad, cold quinoa salad had my protein needs covered and there was as much fruit as I could eat. The veggie sandwich was just OK.

Tuesday evening found me at the Pantheon Parter Dinner. We gathered at the Country Music Hall Of Fame for a great evening of celebration, a few speeches and some quality meals. It was awesome to hear so many experiences and points of view being shared. There are few things that inspire as much confidence in the community than agency leaders sharing what is working and what they are working. This ‘collabratition’ approach is pretty unique to the FOSS world and it is part of what makes it so great.

Can’t find a tweet for this, so here are some of my favorite Drupal people instead:

DrupalKaraoke

Tuesday night ended with some amazing singing by the community at a couple different places. First was the official Mediacurrent after party with much singing. I didn’t go, but thought it deserved a mention

Then a good number of us went first to Ms. Kelli’s, but there was another convention that had already settled in there. But thanks to the quick thinking and hard work by the amazing Stephanie El-Hajj we found ourselves in a much better spot without any competition from any other conferences at Wild Beaver.

Can not find a tweet with a pic, so here is another group enjoying another Karaoke bar in Nashville:

Wednesday

After a long night of singing and rejoicing with the community the next morning was a little rough, so thank goodness for that conference coffee!
Lunch was a serious step up from the previous day with green beans and potatoes along with more quinoa salad. Very full at the end of the meal.
One of the things that stood out was the cards on the tables that gave people talking subjects. I sat at the PHP table be happenstance and had a really great conversation about deployment pipelines and automated testing. There were a lot of topics

Wednesday night brought the Official Pantheon + Lullabot party at FGL House

And yes, there was an after party

Unfortunately I had to leave Thursday morning. It was for a good cause, one of my best friends in the world’s wedding in NOLA.

Sessions

Training Day

Automated workflows in Drupal 8 with GitHub, Composer and CircleCI

I didn’t have a session accepted at DrupalCon this year, but I did get the chance to co-present part of David Needham’s awesome training. I want to take a second to tell everyone reading this to stop for a few minutes and go read Martin Fowler’s definitive paper on Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery. So much of our modern work as website professionals come from thought leaders like this. It is amazing to stand on the shoulders of such giants and participating in discussions like this. Also, getting to lay down knowledge with the likes of Drush maintainer and all around genius Greg Anderson is intimidating and inspiring all at once!

Partner Day

While I didn’t get to attend this event, it looked like it went amazing. Worth a mention here.

Prenote

The official Pre Driesnote Fun You can watch it online, but it is not nearly as fun as being there!

OK, I will admit it. This is my favorite part of the actual conference. My real favorite part is hanging with the community but as far as planned things officially on the schedule, nothing beats the Prenote. Lead by the one and only JAM who is one of the most recognizable mustaches in all of Drupaldom. Every year he and the rest of the amazing community team go out of their way to wake us up and have some good clean fun before Dries gets up and takes a more serious tone. I do hope you can go next year and see it yourself.

Driesnote

There was a lot said in this year’s keynote delivered by our project lead Dries Buytaert. With an introduction that was second to none by my colleague and team lead Steve Persch, the tone was set to get serious and address some big picture things that affect our entire space.
Rather than try to summarize the talk, I encourage you to go watch it. Below are tweets I thought captured the spirit of the event well.

And the rest…

Unfortunately, other than the Prenote and Dreisnote, I only got to go to 2 sessions with the way my schedule worked out. Fortunately I get to go to more sessions per year than the vast majority of people. Also fortunately all the other talks are recorded and available on the DrupalCon site

Don’t trust your gut: agency operations metrics
Ashleigh Thevenet

I will admit, I misread the topic description and thought this was going to be a talk about client KPIs, which is something that is of great interest to me currently. Instead I got an amazing overview of what an agency COO actually cares about, Which in and of itself revealed more about KPIs than I anticipated. This is also one of those talks that stands out as unique to the FOSS world. Literally a COO standing up and saying ‘this is how we do things where I work’ and providing spreadsheets to show how. Dummy data obviously, but if you are a freelancer or small agency and want to know how to get to the next level, her spreadsheets are freely available to clone and leverage. I left feeling amazing about this whole space and our future together.

Raw Notes:
Don’t Trust your gut,
Chief operating officer at BlueSpark
Metrics of her,
number of hours spent with her life
Context makes data meaningful
Lot of spreadsheets in the talk
https://bit.ly/2qjlDOZ
Billable hours,
got to understand where you are spending your time before you can optimize them for billable time
Adapted the billable hours matrix for annual revue per role planning
rev, profit, margin at various utilization rates
Booked Capacity vs Capacity comparison with Monthly and Annual sales targets
Under contract was a runway pipeline
MEGASHEET
https://bit.ly/2qoxJXl
gives actuals and updated a lot
things shift, availability. extention of contratact, act of god, etc
sheet needs to be as fresh as possible
values of accounts
timelines and budgets for all current accounts
remaining budgets
time left
Will my current config of team be able to complete the work they have lined up
capacity
how did the team perform
how is the
Let’s back up to the Billable Hours template
rate and expenses
lists out whole team individuals, roles and such
number of hours per week
realistic utilization planning is the goal
Monthly
potenial revenue per role is the thing she cares about a lot
helps understand when and who to hire
expenses are import to track as well
want to end up at 98% of realistic target
ie 34 hours not 40 a week,
80% utilization losing money
MegaSheet
All project projections
timeline, start date and end date for each phase
Weeks to complete,
Contract
fill in rates and hours for each phase
rate x hours = contract value
time logged, from Jira, manually pulled in
then pulled into actuals tab
Weekly velocity to complete, the number of hour s and weeks and how many hours per week need logge to stay on track
Color coding will help yo a great deal at seeing things at a glance
easy to get overwhelmed but this is needed to project revenue
things will deviate, so you must adjust as you go
assigned some of the work to ‘unknown’
Unknown Frontend and Unkown Backend
makes planning more flexible
color coding red not booked enough, green capacity,
blue under water, overbooked
sometimes 4 to 5 week differentials with how days fall can be tricky
eventually all comes down to hours though
lets you shift projects as needed
don’t try to adjust in your head
important to see big picture as you plan each individual part

Extending the abstract class of privilege: outcomes and lessons learned
Farah Sabbagh
Ashraf Abed

Of all the talks about privilege I have attended, none felt more poignant or a straight up punch to the face than this one. The stories they shared shook me and made me feel sad and angry and really wanting the world to be better than it is. I even found myself squirm as they completely debunked the idea of ‘seeing past race/gender/ect’ being ‘colorblind’, which I will admit here and now I have said before. That does not work in a world where no one else is ‘colorblind’ and only blinds you to the intolerance going on around you.
It gave me a lot to think about and some straightforward examples of how to be a better ally all around. Very grateful for Farah’s and Ashraf’s courage in speaking up and helping us all get better as a community and as people.

Raw notes:
Privilege
Lacking access
real story, got arrested for speeding
that cop became an ally but every cop after had same initial reaction
bad
this affected his life later as had to admit he got arrested
We all have biases
blindly trusting our intuition in social interactions is naive
think before you speak, reassess your initial reactions!
Keep your bias to yourself
Unconscious gender bias
people assumed she knew less than she did when she started out
took her until a job change to get out of that rut
women tend to be assigned tasks that are less impressive
contributes to women being overlooked for promotions
long term impact on their career paths
consider adopting self-selection task assignment
trak, support and encourage female employees to work complex tasks
don’t assign women empathy-based tasks by default
She was accused of being too social to be a real developer
accuser had ‘feelings’ for her
she was new, didn’t have tools to handle the situation
but ‘luckily’ got sick and when came back he was gone
They walked her to her car every day
turns out the accuser had fallen apart mentally and was a threat after that
she stayed around for too long
BAH was a great move for her, a lot of women in tech and improved herself a lot
wording really matters
women they have spoken with are just as interested in pursuing a programming career
Female students are typically top performers
how to extent privilege?
-encounrage and reassure them –
give them homework to see if right for them before class starts
let them see if right for them, don’t penalize them for not wanting to keep going
encourage they will fit if they want it
strongly endorse them to key decision makers using Truthful information
Want to help grow Drupal?
we put a ton of thought into patches for Drupal
Put that much effort into helping your female colleagues
really lay it out clearly, it might feel like overkill but it is necessary
employers make a lot of decisions in the wrong direction with female employees
Older people also have this Bias
assuming they can’t learn new tech
her dad is an accountant, even though he was performing well, they pushed him to retire based on this bias
assuming they don’t want to learn
assume they will just be slower pace
people are not crediting all the experience that is brought ot the table
forgetting most technical problems have been solved before
Racial bias
black person early in career usually has to prove their personality doesn;t fit a preconceived notion
to be seriously considered for tech, black grads must be well spoken, charming,
others can get away with being quiet
‘but I don’t see color’
thats a start but it is not enough
the objectivity ship has sailed
too many others see color for neutrality to work
underprivileged people have faced barriers all their lives
evaluating a person’s fit for tech truly objectively would be to give them experiences, exposure and support before evaluating them
You can’t truly test aptitude with a programming test
posted his grads group picture on FB, got terrible racist hateful comments
people that do see color create a really crappy environment
There’s more
Family life – assumptions that people with use their family as an excuse to work from home or leave early
disabilities
assumptions that people with visible disabilities are less able to perform
single employees are assue to be available 24/7 because they don’t have things going on and they have ‘no one to look after’
Whose job is it to fix this?
nothing is too small – small things can make a big impact
track, support and encourage individuals from underrepresented backgrounds
reach beyond your inner circle
participate in free training events such as GTD, hour of code, etc
Encourage your employer to set up paid internships
AT THE LEAST: RAISE AWENESS! thereby extending privilege
ripple effect can go far – a single top developer can impact Drupal significantly
@webdevdeja
what does better look like?
Documentation initiative
package contrib Composer dependencies in a .zip file (like core does) (think, bad internet connections)
auto-populate tailored documentation
resulting in centralized docs
D8Academy got involved
people who never heard of Drupal dl and install and contribute
Barrier free sprint
step by step instructions very easy to follow for novice
Drupal only benefits from inclusion

Wrapping Up

It was with very mixed emotions I left early to go to a very joyous occasion, a wedding. While I was super looking forward to see a best friend from college ‘tie the knot’, I was sad to leave all the fun and excitement of my Drupal community. I was super fortunate to get to attend and be there for what I got to be there for, but it flew by. It was an absolutely a pleasure and an honor to be there and can not wait until 2019, when Drupalcon goes to Seattle!

NEDCamp 2017: Driving in the New England rain and my last talk of 2017

The direct flight from SFO to BOS is about 5 hours and 30 minutes long. I arrived at dusk in the light rain and got to experience the horror show that is Boston traffic at rush hour. I rarely drive, but I felt very safe in these treacherous conditions because we are never going that fast, 15-20 MPS the whole way. I was very glad to make it to my destination, which was the quaint and confusingly laid out Worcester, MA (local pronunciation: WUUSS-tə), specifically to the campus of College of the Holy Cross for New England Drupal Camp 2017, better known as NEDCamp

I had gotten there a day early so I would not miss the speaker/community dinner and glad I had the chance to cruise around and see the town. I got a very pleasant surprise, finding a vegan Jamaican spot for lunch, Belmont Vegetarian. I got to work from a funky coffee shop right across from city hall and even got to go inside Salisbury Mansion which is nicer than the pics make it seem. They were just putting up decorations for the holiday season and if I lived in the area I would surely go back to see it in all its glory. I rarely take side trips or spend any time outside of my normal conference duties on these trips, so this was very nice. New England is great and all, but it was getting a little too cold for me.

Food and Fun

Friday night dinner

Instead of a speaker/sponsor dinner that was invite only, the Drupal community kicked things off with am open to camp goer who registered at Lock 50. This was a very lovely thing to do, with the trade off being everyone paid for their own meals. It was a joy to eat a pretty amazing gourmet meal with the Drupal community. Getting to connect over some nice drinks and fine food is one of the absolute best parts of any camp.

Breakfast

Almost all camps supply coffee and all should. But not every camp provides a full continental breakfast spread. Thinking back on it, MidCamp was the last time I saw a breakfast banquet quite this good. You can’t learn on an empty stomach, and given I had a set up time before my hotel started serving, this was one of my favorite aspects to this camp. It was all great, but raisin cinnamon bagels are amazing.

Lunch

The staff of Holy Cross is pretty great about dietary restrictions. The lead catering person helped each of us figure out what was what. It was pretty great. There were build it yourself sandwiches, with many bread options for the gluten free, salad, chips and a huge veggie and pickle platter. For those looking for alternatives to that there was humus, tabouli and pita triangles. A true feast but I didn’t really have a lot of room for it since I overdid it at breakfast a bit. Definitely a good problem to have. Stuffed, we were all thankful that there was copious amounts of coffee to keep us going all afternoon.

After Party

The after party kicked off after the last session and we all got a drink ticket to start and a lovely cheese and bread platter. Servers came around with all sorts of goodies including these mushroom stuffed mushrooms that I think I am going to try and make myself. Just breadcrumbs, mushrooms and a lot of garlic mashed up and spooned into mushroom caps and baked. It was great to talk to so many folks about the day and how things had gone with the camp.
We only had the place for about an hour, so we scattered but some of us made plans for dinner. We found this pretty great BBQ joint with OK veg options that was pretty close to a Karaoke bar. They have some of the friendliest staff in the whole North East at Smokestack Urban BBQ. It was a real treat to hang out with the community and get to know each other a little better as people. We are all in this together trying our best, breaking bread is an important thing we all do and reminded us how we are more similar than different.

DrupalKaraoke

Then we sang. It was so much fun, as our party was literally the only patrons for the first hour we were there. Then the crowd came in and we got to show Worcester locals how FOSS does it! I only wish I had video of the 8 minute 25 second version of “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights” by a couple of our community which remain nameless in this post.

Sessions

I was very excited to be at this camp because with my life and focus in other areas, Drupal is still pretty amazing and something I want to learn more about. Some amazing speakers on this year’s lineup, I had a hard time picking which ones I wanted to hit. By the end of the day my brain was mush from info overload so these notes get a little sloppier along the way. So much great info though, and you can see any of these sessions yourself thanks to the tireless efforts of Kevin Thull who records all the sessions, and the New England Drupal community’s youtube channel

Opening Remarks:

My Session

I got to admit, I went into this with a touch of sadness, this is my last speaking engagement of 2017 and as of the time of this writing I hae nothing lined up for 2018, which is the norm for speaker since most camps are just opening up for submissions for the spring around now.
I was very grateful to have a good number of people in my room, it made me feel pretty great. The Q&A was fun as well and I am so glad that this got to be the way I will remember my last talk of the year!

Can’t we all just git along?
Erik Peterson

Having written a talk and workshop on git, I am very curious to see how other people approach it. Erik approaches it from the terminal up. Literally a step by step of what the heck git is doing under the covers. I lost track of taking notes a few times because I moved over to my terminal to try some of this out, like git hash-object which I have not run across before. This is a must watch video for anyone that ever wondered how that black box of magic that we call git works!

Raw Notes:
Not a ‘how to’
not things you will have to do
help understand what git is doing and what it is trying to do
how to fix things when they break
logic behind it
Tim Berglund’s “git from the bits up” is where he got the idea
setting up git
git config –global
file that manages config
initialize a repo
init
that is all you need to do
what did that actually do?
that is meat of talk
What git tries to track
Objects and Refs
Blob – data of the files
Trees – pathing for a blob and other trees
Commits – tree, parent, comments
REFS
Tags – named commit
Heads/Branches – line of commits you can add to
Working directory – the actual files on your disk
Repository – history of all the changes
.git directory in the Working Directory
Commits
Each commit has an identifier hash
commits play one after the other
commit messages should be robust
People expect a master branch
Starting with Raw Build
Creating directory structure
hash-objects command
moving object into index
git update-add
DEMO TIME
mkdir .git
mkdir .gitobjects
mkdir -p .git/refs/heads
refs/heads/master > .git/HEAD
git hash-object
most OS hate large folders
objects in file 10K OK, 10M not ok
git generates huge number of files
everything is stored as objects in git
hashes breaks off first characters and makes new folders out of them
Directory + file is the hash
Still no commit, but no file
exists as a file somewhere, but not checked out
does not know what it is or anything about it
add it to the index
git updateindex -add –cacheinfo 100644 hasidentifier spiral.txt
git write-tree
git cat-file -c hash
git cat-file -p hash
git commit-tree hash
git cat-file -p
adding spiral file
Point of all this
a commit is just a pointer to trees
trees just paths to objects
objects just files in git folder
Git cleanup looks for objects that are not in trees, kill those
head branch detached when not pointed at branch, pointed at specific commit
don’t want to be on a commit, be on a branch with that commit
checkout rewrites your working directory
Rebase and Reset
branching – you can just commit your whole life through
moving to new branch lets other people work on your repo and keep working on your idea
like you didn’t do the work if you want to toss it
objects are still there, branch is gone though
rep log to see changes and bring branch back
merging is getting branches back together
real trees rarely do this
remembers the paths and both branches
then can get rid of branch
rebase is different
a git mere is also a rebase
that is a fast forward merge
rebase moves the base of your branch to a different parent
changing what it is based off of
makes it look like one branch
whole history you are testing against
fetching
vs git pull
pull does a lot
fetch just gets all work done from the remote branch
but nothing else, lets you control what to rebase against
git push me, pull you
git reset soft
moves head pointer wherever, leaves working directory alone
tree (brew install tree)
git branch –contains hash
little history commit

The command-line doesn’t have to be a black box
Jim Fisk

As you might have guessed, even if this is the only post of mine you have read, that I love eating and I love the command line. I was super excited to be able to see Jim lay out some of the tools he is using and how we can leverage them. I walked away with tig installed and man, it is such a nice little tool to more cleanly read git. Honestly think I am going to show this off in future git talks. Lot of great information and Jim is a heck of a nice guy, if you don’t already have a local Docker solution up and running, check out his project Vesl as it seems pretty good, though it is early days. Make sure to check out his slides, as they used some old school telehack figlet 3-d font made with Jim’s CLIdeshow tool.

Raw Notes:
he found himself doing a lot of things with tools
found himself going more and more to command line
wrote this talk to help show others how he found success with it
We will over Docker
Vesl, tmux, vim, and others
basics
how to navigate find where you are, move things, and edit files
basically anything you can do through gui you can do through command line
quicker
Navigational thing
pwd – print working directory
ls – list files
see . and ..
. is folder you are in
.. one level up
cd – nav around the file system
Docker, container service isolated environments that can souse your dependencies and run different version of software in a consistent way. based on your project requirements
just type ‘docker’ see list of commands
all based on a common image you can download and connect containers
‘docker ps’ to see what is running
he created a project that made config easier
called Vesl (on dockerhub)
bas script, complex docker commands and make them easier to run
bloated container that out of the box, ready to go faster though
Vesl loads things behind the scenes from blueprints
DEMO
vesl start container
Fish is shell on top of your commands
fish shell goes ghosting, efficiently run things, autocomplete
predictive text autocomplete, even if not same start of word, related terms
tmux
terminal multiplexer
have multiple shells within shells
why need terminal shells in shells?
ssh 2x and edit in one
tmux bar gets added to bottom
vim – can configure
shortcuts
demo
at the start of what we can do with vim
vim config that helps you do things like debug easier
:w
:q
Fugitive – vim plugin
seatags
tig – better git history git backwards
history of changes and commit messages
see diffs on file by clicking on commit
tree view
look through actual files at that point
edit the old fie without pulling in memory
mysql cli

Keynote

Inclusion and Diversity in the Ever-growing Global Digital Marketplace.
Aimee Degnan

Aimee is a pretty amazing person and speaker. She is one of the first people I remember meeting in the Drupal world and and was super glad to hear her keynote. This was not a lighthearted soft skills talk nor was it a technical session nor was it a business discussion. It was a heartfelt and honest discussion about recognizing our own experiences and recognizing the experiences and situations of others. It reminded me of the talk Andrew Norcross gave at LoopConf earlier in the year, where it was a real gut punch, at least to me. I do my best to be inclusive and use my privilege for the greater good, but there is so much to be done. I intend to improve and hope I can inspire someone else to have that same intent as I go forward. I could not capture a lot of the info from the slides, so make sure you watch the video.

Raw Notes:
How do we identify yourself
project manager
dev, site builder
her into slide and her tech history
do tech
Women owned business 20+ years experience
but who are you really?
race, class, education, sexuality, ability, age, gender, ethnicity, culture, language
lot of the audience looks male
but not sure how we identify inside
get more data
then this is where ask questions and listen what we say
that is diversity
being composed of different elements
this is for people, the true range of differences
the meaning of diversity os not the stat of being different, it is noticing and listing and respecting the differences in others
inner/outer wheel
inner are some things can’t control, like ago, national origin
outside are things you can change, appearance, work experience, Education, Family, Political
fluidity
Different is scary
sometimes hard to find connection points
we like to be around people like us as humans
people find comparisons
you can tell if someone is safe if they are familiar
perceived confidence
but different can be empowering
different brings new ideas, new needs, brings change
society comes with lot of societal baggage
Privilege exists, we must acknowledge it
dominant, most influential
Oppressed, subservience and hardship, especially by the unjust exercise of authoritysomeone ho feels depressed
if don’t speak the language you could have a temporary oppression
intersectionality
trait 1 + trait 2 = total identity
most people have many more than 2
instead of Rosie the riveter being a white woman
3 woman of color, one in hijab
inclusion example of intersectionality
she had hesitations on putting this together
admitting how she is oppressed and privileged
being a tech business leader is how she is afraid of being judged
will she say too many feminist or radical things
awareness
hole built for a circle, other shapes are told by circle “just be yourself and get out”
need to be aware not just of ourself but other people and the situation
cycles of oppression and privileged
in order for a disadvantaged group to get better situation have to take on traits of dominant oppressive class
inflammation – pain cycle – tht you can fix with Advil, not privilege
have to have systemic change to fix
Inclusion – being part of a group or structure
integration says stay in your circle, but no effort to include
inclusion must be cultivated
but be careful not to have assimilation
inclusion is including people as they are, changing the system around the people’s neds
assimilation says change to fit in
homogeneity vs heterogeneity
made of same parts vs different parts
equality vs equity
fence in the way, looking at the problem different
addressing systematic issues
Digital divide
digital privilege
gap has improved over time
worse things happening content censorship and denial of access
across the board, internet is helping with inclusion
content
Drupal is 4.8% of the internet
Digital innovations, like Google translate
translation programs only getting better
why does this matter
where did Drupal start? and by who?
so many languages covered in the Drupal project
Your behavior and actions matter
be an ally
sometimes you don’t know the right thing to do
you can ask what the other person needs and help them, it is OK
be aware communication is beyond language
talk about change vs living change
Empathetic actions
be nice to each other
sounds easy, but not really
change is a process, takes time
is ongoing
must have an intent to improve
Yes we can!

Opening the Black Box: Becoming a Better Developer Through Debugging
Dustin Younse

I recently saw a shirt that said ” ‘;’ hide and seek champion since 1958″ Debugging and I have a long history that goes back to my college days. I remember printing out hundreds of pages of C and C++ code, which I wrote using the Pico editor, on green and white lined paper with the little perforated sides you tore off and then sitting down with a red marker and working through, by hand, where the issues might be. It still gives me nightmares. Thank goodness a LOT has changed since then.
I don’t debug a lot of code these days but it is coming up more and more as I evolve and learn more. The live demo part showed exactly how to use Chrome’s built in dev tools to debug JS. It was fortuitous timing that I could see this talk just as I entered the precarious world of JS and performance tuning. Great job and I learned some things.

Raw Notes:
Examples of errors taking down things
funny tweets
Nothing but text
CSS, Aggregated byt not cached
JS blocked in the browser
File permissions
differences between debugging and troubleshooting
5 minutes vs 5 hours
fixed vs understand why it happened and corrected that
What is the black box?
no CS degree or background, self taught web skills
everyone wanted a website, he would do it for beer money
above average google abilities
late nights staring at error codes
Mental model of Drupal a black cube
thing that did stuff
changed mental model to “Maniac Magee”
kids book
can untangle knots
largest knot in the world, he studies it, unties it with simple pushing and pulling
bootstrap process is complex
got harder in D8
let’s look at some new tools
When all you have is a hammer…
need better tools
“text editors” – notepad, nano
vs text editors – notepad++, Sublime
vs IDEs – more specialized – phpstorm, eclipse, komodo
how we set up Dev environment
FTP development – cowboy coding and ftp
no version control, this is bad
Local Dev – MAMP/Native LAMP
can work offline
print_r()
xdebug possible
Local Dev Next Gen
Kalabox/Lando – Pantheon and Acquia prehooked
behave like the server you will be hosted on
more performance profiling
blackfire – newrelic but local
XHProf
Tidewater
XDebug: step through debugging
hitting pause on code execution
inspect the state of the stack
modify values live
hairy problematic issue story
something is broken!
the ever dangerous live demo
example with chrome debugging tool for JS
modifying as goes walking through step by step, break points
looking at things as they are running
found off by one error
what is broken?
is something not showing up?
new content -is it published?
Log files
learn how to find your log files before you need your log files
multitail
linux/mac utility to easily view logs with more options than tail
tail multiple files at once
where is it broken?
custom module
template.php/.theme file
theme template?
since we don’t hack core or contrib modules
Change one thing at a time
git is your friend
save progress
recreate
make rabbit holes manageable
git bisect id your friend
lets you isolate changes between commits
must have multiple commits on branches and master
start in the middle
imagine a 45 step teddy bear factory
Git diff is our friend
remove your debug statements
ensure you only changes as much as you needed to change
git blame
git annotate
find out who wrote the offending code
not a witch hunt
a chance to find context
you can go ask ‘person’ and might be more info you needed to know
or time specific
debugging techniques
walk away, seriously
talk to a coworker (pair program)
talk to a rubber duck
write ti down by hand, show your work
make the future easier
watchdog
drupal::logger
etc

Did you say taxonomy or content type?
Benji Fisher

I debated leaving this one in here. Due to some other duties I was late to this talk and my brain was starting to go numb on me, so these notes are not the clearest. Benji delivered a great session with all sorts of poetry and dead poet references. After the keynote he even called himself out for only using 3 dead white guys as his poet examples. The crowd was happy to help him out as Emily Dickinson and Maya Angelou (who does have a few public domain poems actually). It was a great community moment. It was also a reminder that Drupal is not always intuitive as the demo went a little weird at one point, but we got to the end with a much better understanding of content type vs taxonomy and how you can leverage both with Drupal!

Raw Notes:
developing vocabulary
builds a Drupal site
manage fields manage forms
name=author
ends up with
All english
all dead
all white guys
copyright
Emily Dickinson is a solid choice
page for William Blake
taxonomy for Blake
how you are going to edit the content type
same here
content type
poet info the same in both
What difference does it make
Drupal for free
revisions, created, timestamps, bulk operations
Drupal also gives taxonomy
hierarchy
drag and drop ordering
list of associated content (nodes)
Demo of admin, (reminded me of what Drupal dev looks like)
Revisions to taxonomy terms, module for that
created and changed timestamps
author info
bulk operations
drag and drop ordering
list of associated content
Admin experience
will you provide custom navigation

Wrapping Up

I will admit, I have not spent as much time in the Drupal community as I have in the WordPress community this year. I felt a little guilty about this when I first showed up. But pretty quickly I remembered that these are really my people, FOSS loving and community driven individuals and just the nicest folks in the world. I hope there are more events for me to go to next year. The community needs to expand, not contract. We should all embrace Drupal for what it can do and make the worked a better place. It took going to this show to remind me of that. Until next year for NEDCamp 2018, thanks NEDCamp and the whole wonderful Drupal family.