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Caching Large Navigation Menus in Drupal

While working on a project for Pega Systems, I had to deal with documentation organized into books, and some of the books had thousands of pages. Each page had a navigation menu listing every page in a large tree structure (nested HTML lists). The tree was collapsed, with just enough branches expanded to show the current page. That's a lot of markup: UL and LI and A, oh my! Did I mention thousands of pages? Generating that markup took a lot of work: database queries, PHP processing, theming ...

Can’t We All Just Get Along? Design & Development Collaboration

This talk explores common myths between design and development, and I’m here to bust them! Is this you? - A designer wondering what happens to your beloved mockups after handed off to the development team - A developer having nightmares about the intricacies of design and functionalities seeming way off base of budget and scope - A project manager watching from the sidelines wondering how this process can be improved

How do I become a (good) web developer?

As a recent bootcamp graduate, I will discuss the multiple stigmas surrounding bootcamps (and their awkward socioeconomic role), their various implications, and finally my experience learning Drupal independently after completing my program. This analysis will support my ever evolving answer to the question, "What am I learning and why?"

Caching decoupled websites is hard, but freaking fast if done right

Implementing a caching layer with a regular Drupal site is pretty standard. But as soon as we have a decoupled website with server-side rendering, things get more complicated: We have multiple services that each need a cache layer Requests can flow through multiple cache layers Purging needs to happen on different cache levels GraphQL likes POST requests, which are hard to be cached

3 Years Decoupled Website Building and Hosting - Our Learnings

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 license, 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.

Google Analytics 201

I was a self-taught Google Analytics user. I thought I was getting by OK. But, since working with professional analysts, I’ve seen how my data wasn’t as complete or accurate as I thought I was. And with bad data, it’s easy to tell the wrong story.  I’m here to level you up, and share best practices for setting up your Google Analytics accounts.  In this talk, we will: provide recommendations on best practices for setting up your views, filters, and goals

Composer in Core Initiative: What it will mean for you

Drupal has leveraged Composer to manage its internal dependencies since version 8.0; however, the way that Drupal has been using Composer is unconventional. Our unconventional hybrid approach has allowed a loose continuity between managing codebases using Drupal 7 methods while simultaneously enabling more modern Composer based workflows. However, the modern Composer based approach was incomplete and unofficial, requiring third-party tools and examples such as drupal-composer/drupal-project.

Follow that data! Letting your users tell you what works.

In a world of endlessly approaching deadlines and pressure for always better results, who has time to do a retrospective?  It turns out, successful teams do.  Undertaking the necessary discipline it takes to develop the habit of this part of the Agile process does take effort but the end results are well worth it.     For a lot of teams that try, these end of sprint meetings can quickly turn into personal anecdote sessions and become completely based on 'gut feel' that is just a painful step that does not feel like it accomplishes anything valuable.