Proposed Sessions

Originally presented at the 2018 PNW Drupal Summit  -- https://pnwdrupalsummit.org/2018/sessions/expecto-patronum-or-how-i-learned-stop-worrying-and-love-command-line  The BADcamp version will have some new & revised spells, errr... content.

Have you outgrown trying to manage all your projects using email or Trello, but tools like Jira and Project are complete overkill? 

As an experienced project manager, I subscribe to the belief from the Agile Software Development Manifesto to value "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". You don't want to spend more time managing the process than actually doing the work. But at the same time, how do you keep your projects within scope, budget and timeline? 

I'd like to present the case study at https://www.drupal.org/case-study/bunny-farm-framework-for-building-the…, detailing how I came up with the architecture, how it works, and why it would be useful.

The module and architecture encapsulates what I've learned over the years on how to create maintainable, fast and secure systems, supporting both decoupled (JSON) and normal Drupal output.

Accessibility can be overwhelming and a little mysterious. Dive in and experience one developer’s story filled with lessons learned, and invaluable tools and tricks picked up along the way. You’ll walk away with the skills to better serve users, and an appreciation for the magic behind the curtain.

Acronyms are everywhere, and if you work in or with a digital agency, you’re likely bombarded by them day in and day out. Emails sent from strategists asking about your KPIs for the year, letters appended to your project manager’s name, requests from marketing for your CRM details...the acronym soup goes on and on. The goal of this session is to equip attendees with knowledge of basic terms used in the industry and the correct ways to use them!

Told through the lens of my errant Googlings, this session will take participants through my journey from music teacher to web developer, examining the different types of learning that occurred along the way. We will delve into theories about learning, techniques to improve information retention and problem solving, and how to shift your perspective to learn what you can even when life is less than ideal.

For quite a while, I've been working with pre-configured gulp files and using the command "gulp watch" to complile my SASS. Recently, I've dug a little deeper to try and understand what Gulp is capable of, how I can customize my workflow with Gulp, and to better understand my alternatives.

This session is a beginners guide to Gulp. We'll start with what Gulp is, what all it is capable of, and whether or not you should use it? We'll take apart the configuration file used by Gulp, gulpfile.js, and show you how to customize it. 

With the continued rise of static site generators that can play nicely with Drupal it has never been easier to take advantage of the speed, security, and scalability of static sites. This session will provide an overview of three static site generator projects and how they can be used to create a static build  based on data from Drupal.

The session will cover:

• An introduction to static site generators

• An overview of Jekyll (a Ruby based option)

Development projects are becoming more complex every day.  Managing a development environment with all the proper configuration and dependencies for just one project can be challenging, and those challenges are exponentially increased when working with multiple projects. Managing a local environment shouldn’t be a cumbersome task.

This session will cover:

• Reasons to use a Docker-based development environment.

Is your Drupal site is more than a just website?  Is it instead an application with hundreds of fields and gigabytes of data? You've probably already realized the difficulty of reporting and analytics from your production site.  This session will explore ways you can flatten your data and move it to a reporting instance on AWS for reporting, analytics, and even microservices. This session will also highlight opportunities for automation along the way.

Content Security Policy is a new layer in web security to protect your site and your users from cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities.  Additional strategies are also available to expand it's capabilities to detect and mitigate threats like malicious browser extensions, content injection from proxies, and unauthorized http requests.  Leveraging Drupal 8’s libraries system, the Content-Security-Policy module is being built to make this tool easily available to every Drupal site.

If you've been in web development for any length of time, a relative, friend or stranger has had an idea for you. This typically involves listening to a lengthy plan of how their idea will make them rich while you try to pretend that you care.

Finally, a friend of mine had a good idea. He had just purchased a Bed & Breakfast with an automated door lock system. He wanted to create a method to automatically send a guest their door keycode on the check-in date. My wheels started spinning, can I build this in Drupal? Yes!

Key Components:

Are you building a team of remote workers? Or transitioning your agency to become “fully distributed?”

Find out how to not only do it, but how to supercharge productivity and everyone’s happiness in the process. Spanning development, account and project management roles, our panel of remote pros share the bag of tools and practices that help them get more done and keep clients wowed — all while petting their own cats on their own couches in their own towns. 

When a client comes to you, don’t start a project, start a relationship. The goal isn’t to solve individual problems, but have an ongoing conversation to assess client needs and find the best solutions. 

Supporting Drupal sites requires attention to not only technical needs but also human. The number one most important element of a support program is to make your clients feel comfortable and taken care of.  That requires a team of people who can all bring their own expertise and unique skills.

It's not easy to form a union, let alone behind prison walls. Mailroom censorship, bogus gang affiliation charges, repression against union organizers, and government surveillance all get in the way. Despite these barriers, organizers persist.

Communication is the lifeblood of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC). Learn how a Drupal helps IWOC keep channels of communication open, amplify voices usually marginalized and coordinated a nationwide strike that broke into the mainstream media and shook the foundations of the prison industrial complex.

Stanford University offers a wide array of opportunities for its students to study abroad. Historically, these opportunities were administered by various departments from all corners of the university. In 2015, Stanford’s Office of International Affairs started work on Stanford Off-Campus Learning Opportunities (SOLO), an initiative to bring all of these opportunities under one roof.

We often talk about websites the way we talk about cars. Are you driving a flashy sports car or a stable hatchback? And is yours a lemon, no matter how pretty the paint job? And if you just got one used, what’s going on under the hood? There’s a way to address these questions about your website, and it’s called a technical audit.

Remember when Drupal 8 was brand new and full of new features?

Are you still excited about Drupal 8? Drupal 8 has added many great features since 8.0.0 and many more features are coming soon(ish). If you haven't started with Drupal 8 or haven't kept up with new features that are being develped for Drupal core, this session is for you.

This presentation is an overview of what Drupal could look like in the near future. We will explore current development that is happening to add new features to Drupal core such as:

This beginner session will introduce the incredible potential of using the command line in developing for the web.

Interested Drupal users, designers and site builders will gain the knowledge of using SSH to connect to servers, Git for version control, Drush and Drupal Console for workign with Drupal, Aliases and Bash scripts for common tasks, and automation/task runners like Grunt and Gulp.

Attendees will come away from the session with their interest piqued, with the desire to learn more about using the command line in their workflow.

New ways of interacting with machines are taking over the traditional ways of communications. In the form of chatbots/ virtual assistants, the future of communication with machines seem to lie with screen-less experience.

According to a survey by Gartner, by 2020 30% of web browsing sessions will be without screens.

Drupal has been criticized as "being slow" and, it's true, performance can sometimes be an issue. Some performance improvements are made easily by turning on core caching and leveraging a good hosting platform that provides things like Varnish and Redis support. Once you get through the easier wins, tuning can get more challenging and, often, the issues lie with slow database queries.

In this session, we will cover:

Debugging in the browser is something every Front End Developer should know, I wish I knew this before... but if you want to save time and learn more about how JS runs in your browser this session is for you.

In this session I'll explain how to debug JavaScript and execute your code step by step. You will learn how to set breakpoints, watch expressions, debug events, and create and execute code directly in your browser.

http://slides.com/isramv/js101#/

Decoupled Drupal is clearly here to stay, so what does this mean from a business point of view? As we consider all the implications of this change -- a new programming language, new licences, and the technical considerations of how we visualize and build websites -- it’s important to identify how and when adaptations need to be made to our businesses to support all these changes.

Deploying front-end changes can be scary – while you may have set out to make nothing more than a humble CSS change to the footer of a landing page, it's very easy for that new CSS rule to cascade (excuse the pun) out of control, impacting other regions or pages in ways you never intended.

It used to be easy to deploy applications, you just deploy a VM on DigitalOcean, SSH into it, set up your LAMP stack and go from there.

What is all the excitement about AWS, Provisioning, Docker, Kubernetes, Serverless? You are still using DigitalOcean and are happy with it? If you asked yourself that question, I will give you the answer.

This session will walk you through the evolution of application deployment strategies and practices, starting from manual server deployment and ending in cloud infrastructure orchestration best practices.

You will learn:

The decentralized web is rapidly gaining steam in privacy and security circles as the promise of a "Web 3.0" begins to take hold. Nonetheless, among all of the challenges facing the nascent decentralized web, perhaps none is as pressing as user experience. Though many tout network effects and convenient features as the leading factors that led to the Big Tech walled gardens characterizing the web today, the attractive and seamless user experiences that the closed web offers are far too frequently ignored.

Nobody loves writing or responding to a request for proposals (RFPs) but it is often a necessary process. In this session, we will discuss the steps it takes to write a good website RFP, but also how to attract the right vendors to bid and what to do to make this process an educational and meaningful experience.

In this tactical session you will learn:

Learn to move content to Drupal 8 using the Migrate module without writing a single line of PHP. This training is aimed at site builders who will learn to combine various core and contributed modules and write YAML files to accomplish content migrations. No prior experience with the Migrate module is required.

Drupal deployments are hard. You have to make sure your code is deployed, composer dependencies are pulled, schema updates are performed and caches cleared, all with keeping the website up and responsive for the users, add the fact that you host on multiple servers and you have active users online updating some content 24/7 and it gets even more interesting. What if anything goes wrong and you want to rollback, do you have to deploy again and have your users wait?

The answer is No. Blue/Green deployments are the solution to this problem, but how do we do that with Drupal?

Why would a small Drupal shop take on building a big platform?  Learn what motivates the co-founder and the newest worker-owner of a 12-years-in-business web development shop to try to steer it in a radically new direction.

This session will provide an overview and live demonstration of the FolderShare module for Drupal 8. This module adds data management and data sharing capability to a Drupal site. The module takes advantage of Drupal's capability to provide a rich authoring/viewing environment that includes providing description to any file or folder as well as discussing it via comments. Users can securely upload and organize arbitrary files and folders and share them either publicly or privately with others (like Dropbox).

The first principle behind the Agile Manifesto is “to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”

In an agency setting, our clients are one of the primary customers that we look to satisfy with our work. By bringing clients into the agile process, we can increase engagement and satisfaction - leading to more successful projects for all users, team members, and stakeholders.

In this session, you’ll learn:

Nightwatch.js is an easy to use Node.js based End-to-End (E2E) testing solution for browser based apps and websites. Practically speaking, this means you can write JavaScript that will visit and test your website in various browsers. It does this by using the W3C WebDriver API to run an actual browser on your system and perform tasks on DOM elements.

It's not easy managing a team of engineers. We manage work volume, timelines, and budgets, in addition to the engineering process itself. In a perfect world, we would create a series of technical processes and toolsets that supports a team of happy and productive engineers. However, even in this perfect world we need critical insight into the creative processes of our developers. Sometimes, what makes developers the most efficient isn't what makes them happy. And what makes them happy might be against a new business mandate.

In discussions about accessibility and diversity, our thoughts tend to jump to ARIA links, screen readers, and people of different ethnicities. While these are key aspects to both topics, this talk will push your thinking to considerations beyond accessibility and diversity basics. At its core, embracing accessibility provides us with a launching ramp to usability, and it helps us to serve and support a variety of users.

Do you host your own Drupal?

Do you wish you could have that great git-push-deploy workflow provided by so many hosted solutions, but on your own servers?

Wish no more! 

With Open Source DevShop, you can use any linux server to host, test, and develop your Drupal sites.

DevShop installs in minutes, with no special script writing or configuration required. 

In this session, we will demonstrate Automated Pull-Request-Environments with Behat testing, completing and deploying a new feature of our website LIVE in session!

Last summer, I took up the challenge to setup of a POC of running a simplytest.me like service with Kubernetes. The end result is a simple demonstration of the power of Kubernetes.

Using helm we can easily create ephemeral environments with additional modules with a single command.

All in 231 lines of code..

https://github.com/thom8/simplytest

We all know that every good, juicy story must have a compelling beginning that draws the reader in, action throughout and an ending that wraps up the story elements into a satisfying ending. 

Like a good story, a good website needs to draw your desired audience in, keep the user engaged through their journey on your site until they take the desired actions.

In this session, we explore how to write that story.  Utilize this no-fail approach to outlining the needs and requirements of your organization and audience to ensure that everyone gets the results they’re looking for.

By 2020, 85% of all enterprise interaction will be via bots.

AI-powered bots can make frictionless customer experiences, and drive more conversions. But how are you getting your chatbots to deliver the right answers? Are you stuck recreating all your content in a format that bots can use? That's definitely needless duplication of work, and the slower way, so your competitors could beat you to market.

Few things that I would cover in the session:

Ever wanted to start a business while working remotely as a Drupal developer? This session is where you find out how.

Since remote work has taken off, developers can code for agencies on a part or three-quarters time basis and still have room to seriously pursue other interests — stay home to raise a child, go to school, or even start a separate business.

drupal-project is now the officially-recommended starting point for Drupal 8 sites with Composer. In this session, I'll show you how to:

1. Quickly spin up a new site with Composer and drupal-project
2. Customize drupal-project to suit your particular needs
3. Leverage post-install tasks to keep yourself DRY

The goals of the learnings from this session are to:

There’s been a lot of ink spilled about how the RFP process is broken, particularly when it comes to technology projects. This session isn’t going to litigate various viewpoints on that front, because RFPs are not going anywhere anytime soon — especially when it comes to nonprofit, higher ed, and public sector projects.

Ignore the naysayers! Your RFP can be brilliant!

Recently the field of static prototyping, living style guides, and front-end focused development tools has blossomed, and the adoption of these processes has entered into best practices. But we’ve always felt something was missing from this formula and the de-facto tools: Content Strategy.

This session is the fourth one in the series, following the How to Content Model in Drupal 8 at DrupalCon Vienna 2017, Drupal 8 Hidden Power at DrupalCon Dublin 2016 and Drupal Architectures for Flexible Content at DrupalCon Barcelona 2015.

Walk away from this creatively practical, amusing, and down to earth look at Accessibility with a firm understanding of the Accessibility Life Cycle and the roles each of us plays in its success.

• Better understand how Accessibility impacts all users

• Learn the difference between WCAG 2.0 & 2.1 and see where 508 compliance fits in

• Have a short list of common issues to help you set the stage with stakeholders

Unexpected complications will always arise and having explicit goals, positive dynamics, budget, timing, team with balance of skills, access to the information, the right channels to communicate, useful and constant feedback in a collaborative space will grant the ingredients to succeed.

Taking the time to get the essential pieces in place from the start will guarantee the success of a Project; as well as the team´s satisfaction because they are creating something wonderful and meaningful together.

3 T´s are Key factors in the longevity of the relationship with our client.

Live arrays define a website: its layout, functionality, and even its queries in a way that is theoretically language and platform-independent.

Straightforward and valuable agenda:

1. Differences between Design System vs. Pattern Library vs. Style Guide.
2. How to make it [work] serve for your Team.
3. How to integrate it all with Drupal.
4. How to share the Design language across Team and beyond - to the Client.

Properly organized, Design System should serve for you (not waste your resources!) and make your Frontend, Backend, Designers and Client all happier!

In the beginning, there was a conference called Decoupled Dev Days. It had a web site that was React but not actually decoupled at all. Then the next year, it became Decoupled Drupal Days and was still a static site. But this time, it was made with Gatsby. And as the days passed, and the content became more unmanageable, the need for a better CMS was needed. So Drupal was added and the site instantly became decoupled and easy to manage.

No.. Not really.

There were hoops to jump through, build problems, entity reference access issues and image conundrums.

Google Search is the most-used search engine on the World Wide Web, handling more than three billion searches each day. In this session, you will learn how you can optimize your websites for users and to be compatible with Google search engine. You will learn how search works. You will be given tips on how to do well on search and explore tools that Google offers which you can use to manage your online presence on Google Search. This session is suitable for website or business owners as well as web developers who want to learn more about your website presence on Google organic search.

What happens when you finish college and still don't know what you want to be? When you have to enter the workforce and start your life with no clear vision of where you might end up professionally? That's exactly what I had to find out the hard way. I spent years working uninspiring, thankless jobs that paid the bills. I got married and had a son, then had no identity other than "wife" and "mommy." I was hopelessly lost, depressed, and my worst self.

Like many in our community, I came to opensource from a non-traditional route. In this session I will share my journey to open source technology professional from a Bachelor of Arts degree majoring in Studio Art and minoring in Theatre, Master of Fine Arts in Theater and, a certification in Non-Profit Management.

You might ask, "Your degrees are in what?!"

Lets throw into the melange, severe learning disabilities discovered when I was a child.

There's been a lot of talk around the community about decoupling Drupal and using it as headless CMS, or progressively decoupling it and embedding modern JS frameworks inside a Drupal page. But when do you consider just not introducing Drupal and working with a pure framework implementation?  And what if you still need to host it alongside Drupal?

In Drupal 7, variable values can be overridden within settings.php. With the introduction of the configuration system in Drupal 8, overriding configuration values can be done in a similar manner, but other methods are now possible also. The session will cover:

• Reusable Patterns (Frontend Components) vs Web Components.
• Separation of concerns (aka MVC): styling, functionality, data.
• Yarn Workspaces to maintain separate component and manage its dependencies.
• data- attrs to control components in a declarative way and w/o js.
• Twig to build all together.
• Using with Drupal or other CMS.
• Using with Fractal or other pattern library.
• Demos: Reusable Carousel, Reusable Gallery, Reusable Modal, compound components.

Security is not a one-time activity that is performed and completed. A mature operation promotes continuous improvement in an ever evolving landscape of threats and mitigation techniques. Where does this leave us in the Drupal community? This presentation focuses on the tools and techniques for promoting security in practice related to Drupal, both the infrastructure and the application. We will explore the different user personas and targeted attacks that can be exploited within typical Drupal applications.

What's the deal with all this serverless talk? In this session you will learn the basic concepts around serverless. Serverless is a broad term used to describe an approach where the developer doesn't have to manage the server, only pays for what resources they use, and where scaling is automatic. We will take a beginner friendly look at this approach to development as well as walk through real world examples of use cases. Serverless has many uses, especially for decoupled projects. Attendees will leave with a good working knowledge on the subject.

Are you going to your local meetup or regional camp and watching sessions?  Have you ever thought "I could do that" but are not sure how to get started? Well good news, this session is for you.  Speaking at camps is a great way to give back to the community and assure that your tribal knowledge gets passed on.  
Come learn the ropes with this hands on course that will guide you through figuring out what to talk about, how to submit sessions and some best practices on delivery. 

There are a crazy amount of different approaches for layout management in Drupal today:

• Layout Discovery/Builder
• Block Layout
• Display Suite
• UI Patterns
• Bricks
• Paragraphs (+ Frontend UI)
• ...

In this session we will go through all of them and try to make a big picture — what is designed for, and how to use them properly — together, or independently from each other.

Ying and yang, night and day. One completes the other one. Tom has no fun without Jerry. After years working solo, we have found our better halves. 

When a client relationship starts, both the Account Manager and the Project Manager are in search of success and profitability - the perfect golden cheese. One manages the work flow, while the other one keeps transparency and manages communications between agency and client. 

Find out how this dynamic duo oversees client, team, project and budget health. 

Some topics we’ll cover:

Every developer has been there: fresh out of school, new to the field, or using a new technology. There is a lot to know to successfully build Drupal websites. To be successful, developers learn technical skills in school or from websites and books. Applying those skills in the real-world is not always straightforward. In addition, soft skills are equally as important to being successful in this field and are often neglected.

I've been running a small Drupal shop for several years now and have experimented with lots of tools and technologies to manage my workflow, contractors, and the financial aspects of my business. It's easy to waste a lot of time chasing the latest and greatest tools.

I'd like to share the tool set I'm currently using, things I've tried, and gaps that I still need to fill. Most of all, I'd love to hear what tools that others have used and why they choose them. 

Here are the categories I plan to discuss:

React.js has become one of the top players in the JavaScript libraries world. WordPress has rebuilt its WYSIWYG editor using React. Drupal has recently adopted the library to create admin interfaces. This session aims to explain the basic concepts of React outside of the context of any particular CMS implementation. Many examples will be presented to help you understand it and why it is so powerful.

Learning objectives:

Great technologists often rise through the ranks, assuming responsibilities that go beyond just delivering technical work. This talk reflects on my journey from an engineer to leading teams. I’ll talk about what I’ve learned, how I learned it, and share my evolving thoughts on technical leadership. I share my perspective on topics like business awareness, servant leadership, failing fast, taking calculated risks, data-driven decision making, promoting pragmatism, and sharing a vision.

We are all on the outside, even when we are on the inside. Understand and explore inclusive actions to make a wholesome community - Drupal, family, friends, and life.

What does that even mean, anyway?

Everyone is disabled sometimes. Everyone is an outsider sometimes. Each person is a mix of disabilities and abilities, privileged and oppressed. We are comprised of life experiences that we must be sensitive to in ourselves and others as we communicate.

In this session, we will take a critical look at how the new JS world is impacting Drupal. We will address the barriers we have to make Drupal relevant for this novel ecosystem and analyze how our current Drupal administrative interface lags behind.

We rely our whole Drupal administrative interface on the fact that there is a site builder to build things. Maybe it's time to look at it differently. An alternative is OpenStory, a decoupled administrative interface aimed to improve the editorial experience in Drupal.

We will address the following points:

As important as estimation is to setting customer/stakeholder expectations and ultimately to paying the bills, there is surprisingly little discussion about what makes for a sound estimation strategy.

As developers, we are capable of many amazing feats. We can create experiences that touch the lives of millions, brings aid to the corners of the world, empower new businesses and bring a voice to the voiceless. However with this capability, we must also take on the responsibility for the people, and data, we interact with.