Beginner

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.

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.

SimplyTest.me has been a long-standing tool that has served Drupal community members with  an easy-to-use tool for creating Drupal sandboxes. This session walks through how people use SimplyTest and shares the various features of SimplyTest and the current underlying technical architecture, including the distributed computing infrastructure, use of LXC, and the Drupal 7 based provisioning platform. Based on lessons learned and emerging technology, a roadmap has been created to both modernize and evolve SimplyTest.

Drupal is one of the largest and longest-standing Open Source communities, yet it can feel difficult to make an impact. How do you find your place in such a large and diverse community? Many community members have made contributions to the project outside of code that have had a significant impact. I will share some stories and examples, to provide ideas of how you might be able to provide your contribution to the project. And using the framing of a “hero’s journey” we will explore how all the pieces fit together to make an impact on the greater whole.

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.

Campaign Kit is a new module that provides multiple functions to accept donations, including:

• standalone donation campaigns with fixed goals and/or end dates
• peer-to-peer campaigns

Rather of the boring "Would you like to support us with a donation?" call-to-action, instead create campaigns that have goals and let people know how the campaign is doing.

Watch the session video here.

Watch the session video here.

After writing many Drupal modules but finally faced with releasing my first Drupal contributed module (https://www.drupal.org/project/campaign_kit), I was faced with the following questions:

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. 

Watch the session video here.