Your humble narrator holding a bucket of doughnuts, because Portland.
Several of us here at LC Advanced travelled to Portland, OR last week to attend Drupalcon. Despite soaking up as much rain as knowledge, we all had an awesome time out there, and left in great spirits. The best part of Drupalcon (other than Voodoo Donuts of course), were the people we met. We spent the whole week hanging out with Drupalists from all over the world, including a bunch from Western Massachussets. You can’t beat that.
Oh yeah, and then there’s the sessions. For a serious Drupal enthusiast, it can be hard to find quality information relating to your specific interests. Even if you can find a Drupal meetup, you’re going to get some blank stares when you try to start a conversation about something obscure like building repeatable infrastructure with Chef. In this regard, Drupalcon sessions are like an all-you-can-eat buffet for a nerdy Drupal guy like myself. There’s literally no other place in the world where you’ll find hundreds of people jammed into a room to talk about the new REST API’s available in Drupal 8.
Here were a few of my favorite sessions from Portland. Follow the links to check them out.
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Building for a post-mobile world - Lullabot’s Jeff Eaton has to be one of the most entertaining presenters I’ve ever seen. He was able to communicate the basics of good content strategy in a way that made it interesting, even for my code-crazy developer brain. His argument for getting rid of (or at least severely limiting) the client’s reliance on the WYSIWYG struck home.
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Devops for Drupal: Why We Cook With Chef - Promet Source put on a great presentation explaining why they made the switch from managing their servers with shell scripts and prayers to using Chef. What this presentation lacks in… uh, presentation, it makes up for in real world explanations and tips for how a busy dev shop can bake saner, more consistent environments into their workflow.
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Behat, Behavioral-Driven Development and Selenium in Drupal - KNPLabs Ryan Weaver brings a fresh perspective on the development cycle in talking about testing tools for real people (AKA Behat). For those not in the know, the purpose of BDD is to turn written specifications (like “When I log in as an administrative user, I should see my profile”) into executable tests that can be verified programmatically. This is hugely different from Drupal’s current testing system, Simpletest, which you may need to be an evil supergenius to use. Despite coming from a Symfony background, Ryan does an awesome job of focusing on how Behat can be used with Drupal.
So anyway, that’s a quick snapshot of my week in Portland. If you were there and met any of us, feel free to drop us a line. Look forward to seeing you all in Prague and Austin!
