Sessions

The pandemic proved that anything can derail us in a moment. Last year, our plans were put on hold, our lives were changed. We all ended up with zoom fatigue trying to satisfy our human need for social contact and social change.

Drupal 9 has been happily released, and everyone is eager to move to the new version.

With an increased awareness of DEI and accessibility in the world, are you keeping up online? From Zoom to Twitter to websites, this talk will highlight the importance of creating accessible, diverse, equitable and inclusive digital spaces.

There are a plethora of options to set up a Drupal environment for local development; from MAMP to Virtual Machines to Docker. The developer experience of all these solutions has improved greatly over the course of the last few years. Install the application, run a few commands and you have a Drupal environment with various dependencies up and running.

Many Drupal projects spend a lot of time and energy on architecture, integrations, deployment pipelines, user experience and more. Very few spend time tuning the editor experience, often resulting in obtuse and intimidating content editing interfaces. The result? Stale content, unhappy clients who dread editing the site.

As a site builder or content editor looking for continued career growth, what should you learn next? In this talk, we'll explain tools and technologies simply and how learning them aligns with common career paths.

This session will cover the basics of getting started with Layout Builder for Drupal 8 and 9. We will cover how it can be used to supercharge your site building tasks so that content editors can utilize the awesome power of Layout Builder for a unique front-end presentation. 

In this talk, we will go over:

There you are, a senior developer, minding your own business when suddenly you are trusted (and thrusted) into a manager role. Now what? What should you do, and when is the right time to panic?

“Go Away and Come Back Tomorrow” - that’s what the man at the gate to the Emerald City said to Dorthy and her companions in the Wizard of Oz. Every inaccessible site is essentially putting a face at the door that yells “Go Away” to nearly 20% of the US and Canadian populations. 

...but clients and budgets and deadlines, Oh My!

Case studies are great sales tools. But how many times have you gotten ready to submit a pitch, and realized you were missing case studies for the projects you want to highlight? You assumed somebody on the team would write one after the projected deployed, but everyone got reassigned to other projects, and it slipped through the cracks, again. And now you are sad.

In these especially tense and stressful times, we are often in situations that can make traversing difficult conversations even harder.

There are moments when we need to discuss, argue and defend ideas and issues, and, at times, we even need to defend ourselves.

Discover how to use your strengths and passions to give back to Drupal through a community project.

It’s easy to forget that our programs actually run on metal; where ones and zeros are stored as charges in physical components. Modern programming languages give us a false feeling of separation from these circuit boards. Interpreted languages like PHP offer such flexibility, we often don’t consider the low-level issues, such as how our code affects memory allocation.

Estimations are the baseline of every project. If you will perform unreliable estimates subsequently it will lead you and your team to burn the midnight oil or work over the weekends to meet timelines. We have practiced beautifully to take both project timelines and work-life balance seriously.

A look at my 2020 year-long project of migrating the website for the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech from a completely proprietary content system to Drupal 9, all while dealing with the uncertainties and headaches of a pandemic.  We'll explore how I dealt with finding and getting content out of a one-of-a-kind CMS with zero documentation and managed the project with virtually

Every day we have a series of choices to make. Get up early to work-out or hit snooze and sleep a bit longer? Make a nutritious meal at home or order something maybe just a bit less healthy to go? Finally, stop rocking sweatpants at work or switch to wearing PJs instead? All the choices we make - even the little ones - shape our identities and empower us in our own lives.

Freelancers and small agencies typically don't have the luxury of having a person dedicated to bringing in new work. However, that doesn't make the business development effort any less important for a small agency or freelancer.