big ideas

How Drupal as a Service Can Save Our Livelihoods and our Lives

Drupal is better than ever, but whether it is more successful is questionable. A pincer threatens Drupal. One side, Drupal's own power and complexity, discourages new users and contributors. The other, proprietary platforms, increasingly squeeze out custom web development through sheer economies of scale. Retreating into Drupal's new fortress, the enterprise, leaves many of us on the outside— and it doesn't escape the pincer, which will continue until there's nowhere left to hide.

Scaling Community Discussion and Decision-making

Any free/libre software, volunteer, or even startup project will have elements of do-ocracy (rule of those who do the work) but not all decisions should devolve to implementors. Rather, a basic principle is that decisions should be made by the people who are most affected.

Advancing Developer Communities with Kubernetes and Drupal

Kubernetes is a powerful tool that drastically changes the deployment and hosting options for our web projects. Kubernetes is also the most active open source project on GitHub and introduces an entirely new way of thinking about systems and hosting. In this session, I will share some of the challenges faced by organizations trying to move from traditional systems development as they approach a cloud-native mindset. I will outline why the movement to Kubernetes is essential and why you might want to participate.

A Survey of Emerging Technologies That Complement Drupal

This presentation is a high-level survey of emerging technologies that complement Drupal. Drupal can do a lot of things well, but, Drupal is also capable of working with best of breed tools thanks to its robust framework and vast set of contributed modules. We explore how this integration occurs for some promising technologies.

Anonymous Personalization Without Leaving Drupal

Drupal has always been very strong at customizing user experiences for authenticated users, but what about anonymous users? What if you wanted to show a new banner block on your home page for first time visitors? Or gate a resource until users have filled out a contact form? For the most part, anonymous user display is determined by the url path, and per-user customization is dependent on excluding the page from cache, custom javascript or third parties.

Storytelling for Authentic Connection

Have you ever listened to a truly mesmerizing storyteller? Ever wondered how they effortlessly draw you in and leave you invested in the outcome? Lily Berman did too, and outside of building her Drupal account and project management chops, began studying the storytellers who captivated her. Since then, she has won storytelling competitions and been featured on the internationally-renowned The Moth podcast.

Introducing Mediacurrent's Rain Enterprise Distribution with Decoupled Front-End

In the days where decoupling Drupal's back-end from the Front-End has become an attractive solution and in some cases a necesity, Mediacurrent has developed a Drupal 8 Distribution for Enterprise Systems called Rain.  The RAIN installation packages the best solutions the Drupal community has to offer so that organizations can build sites faster. We have used RAIN internally for the last two years, making improvements along the way prior to its release as an open-source project.

3... 2... 1... Launching Your Site

You have created a beautiful, shiny new web site or a stellar partner has created one for you. It is ready to launch and usually someone just hands it over to a server administrator or the DevOps team. Instead, this time you are the launch team. Don’t panic. This session will give you the knowledge to understand what you need to make it a smooth launch. To launch, you need various pieces of information about domains, DNS, SSL and more. You then have to set these up correctly. If you do so, you should have a smooth launch of your new site.

Developers with Super Powers: Becoming Cross-Functional

As projects become larger and more complex, so too do the teams required to make them great. When the requirements seem to grow beyond reach we all need to be superheroes to keep up. Staying siloed into our individual roles is no longer viable. To keep up we all need to develop our own super powers by learning skills outside our role to become cross-functional and succeed both individually and as a team. By learning to be more cross-functional and expanding knowledge into the other disciplines required to build and maintain a site, a developer can:

How to Kill a Giant