2024 Sessions & Recordings

Discover the versatility of Ansible beyond CI/CD in this dynamic seminar tailored for developers and dev teams. Ansible is a powerful tool that can automate a wide array of repetitive tasks to help you standardize and streamline your development processes.

In this session, we will demystify Ansible by taking you through a comprehensive example of a Drupal installation. Step-by-step, we will break down the procedures involved, highlighting the unique features that set Ansible apart. 

Whether you're a seasoned developer looking to refine your workflows or new to automation, this session will equip you with practical insights and the confidence to start harnessing the power of Ansible in your projects. Join us and leave with a newfound understanding of how Ansible can transform your development practices.

Ever wanted to spin up a Drupal 7 - 11 site? A Backdrop site? A Headless Drupal site? A CiviCRM site? play with it? add some modules? Drush around? Composer away? Then drop the site, or pause it, come back to it and work on some more? and when you're done... deploy it off to some cheap VPS (server) and let it rip? WELL... here you go. Check out DrupalForge.org. Come to this session to get your first 1000 points.

DrupalForge is a Free Cloud Enabled Drupal development platform. Use it to Develop, Deploy, Manage any version of Drupal, on any server, from anywhere, using any device, at any time of the day.

Nothing to set up on your laptop/desktop. Spin up new dev environments like a pro, pre-built with Composer and Drush - all in the cloud and in less than 5 minutes. Use VS Code IDE and PhpMyAdmin in the browser to work on your site. Share your URL with others. Collaborate with other developers. Connect your own servers AWS, Digital Ocean, Linode, etc. Deploy your site to it with a few clicks. Unpause your Cloud Dev Environment at any time in the future and redeploy to your server.

Get your Power Tools for running Drupal in the cloud.

Addressing poor performance can be an intimidating challenge, but it doesn't have to be. In this session you'll learn to hold people accountable, from setting clear expectations, to addressing violations of trust, to measuring productivity (yuck!), all the way to ending the employment relationship. Once you see how an accountability process can be both effective and respectful, you'll be ready to confidently manage your unreliable developers.

There's a lot of resources out there on how to give a good conference presentation, but how many are actually geared towards putting you truly at ease with the process?  Come and learn about presenting from a web developer with over twenty years of presentation experience who is also a twenty-year veteran professional puppeteer, giving him unique insight into public speaking from the theatrical perspective as well.  Learn how to set yourself up for success by making yourself as comfortable as possible from the time you submit your proposal to the time you conclude your presentation.  Who knows?  Maybe next year you'll be the one at the podium!

This session is for anyone who's ever remotely thought about giving a presentation, yet has hesitated to do so.  However, even if you have a few presentations under your belt, you can learn how to improve your craft while reducing your anxiety. 

[This presentation will be based on an outline available at https://webdev.iac.gatech.edu/training/be-good-presenter-enjoy-it]

[An archive of my past web development presentations is available at https://webdev-pres.iac.gatech.edu/]

Docker, Podman, they're all fine tools. But they're just scratching the surface of what's possible. Imagine a world where 'dependency hell' is a myth, where your builds are always reproducible, and where your team shares perfectly consistent environments. Sounds too good to be true? It's not. Get ready to dive deep into a whole new level of environment management with Nix. Let me show you how!

WordPress has a ridiculously low point of entry, and that may be fine for a single developer or site owner who does everything from the Dashboard and Theme Customizer. But what if you have multiple developers and multiple environments? How do you develop and deploy new features, maintain software dependencies, and keep your sanity? There really is a better way: Bedrock from Roots.io, a professional WordPress project boilerplate.

UT Chattanooga had a WordPress Multisite that was managed "the old way" since 2007. We had a test environment and a production environment, running on a solid infrastructure, but making updates to our custom theme and plugins was done via FTP and sheer luck. Project history included broken deployments, seat-of-the-pants recoveries, and well-meaning super-admins crashing the production site by installing incompatible plugins.

In 2021, with several new coders onboard and increased pressure to develop and deliver custom plugins and themes, we knew we needed to modernize our WordPress project, and automate deployment to the on-prem infrastructure.

For local development, Lando was an obvious choice, since we were already using it for Drupal development. But what about defining the project with Composer, and using Git for multi-dev source control? Enter Bedrock, from Roots.io, a professional WordPress project boilerplate. Bedrock makes WordPress multi-environment capable, while PHP Composer manages all WordPress software, even custom private themes and plugins. Bedrock restructures WordPress core for multiple environments with individual configurations, and makes it easy to keep the project under version control with Git.

Laravel Envoy makes multi-environment deployments predictable, with zero downtime and scripted server commands. No more long nights of maintenance, no more running WordPress automated updates direct from the Dashboard. No more trying to remember all of the post-deployment tasks, such as updating the database and flushing caches. And what if something fails and we need to roll back to the previous deployment? Well, we have that covered! Envoy lets you run any command line SSH or WP-CLI task in a storybook script.

In a large organization with complex marketing and publicity needs, shortcut URLs are a must-have for all advertising mediums. You might allow web content editors to create their own URL aliases, but what about the needs of thousands of other users in hundreds of departments? What about shortcuts for content in dozens of systems other than the main public CMS? Don’t clutter your main website’s redirects with everyone’s shortcut URLs. Give your users their own shortening service with YOURLs.

UT Chattanooga runs Drupal for their main public website, which has thousands of redirects for shortcuts, aliases, and legacy links. We have about 120 web content editors in various departments, but we don’t  allow them to create arbitrary shortcut URLs, only canonical links based on the hierarchy of their section of the website. Although we will create shortcut URLs on the main domain, utc.edu, upon request, our general users wanted to create and manage their own shortcuts… and generate their own QR codes.

YOURLs (along with some plugins and a theme) fulfills these needs:

• Branded front and back ends
• Branded shortcut URLs and QR codes
• Single Sign On
• User levels and permissions
• Users manage their own data

Node.js is a compelling platform for building all types of applications for startups to enterprises. Node.js strategically unites developers through the universal language of JavaScript. Or TypeScript! Why should you learn Node.js, and where do you start?

You will walk away from this fun introduction to Node.js having learned its strengths and the tools you need to be productive. We will cover a typical workflow of creating and debugging a web application. We'll also look at popular frameworks, libraries, and learning resources to give you the best start.

At DrupalCon Portland 2024, Dries Buytaert unveiled the "Starshot" initiative, a vision poised to bring the most significant transformation to Drupal since its Symfony rewrite over a decade ago.

Named after JFK’s famous “Moonshot” speech, the Starshot initiative aims to create a radically more user-friendly version of Drupal. This ambitious project encompasses several key sub-initiatives, including:

• Recipes
• Experience Builder
• Project Browser
• Automatic Updates
• Improved Documentation
• A new starting point called “Drupal CMS”

In this wildly entertaining session, I’ll guide attendees through the essence of Starshot, explaining each sub-initiative and how they interconnect. I’ll also discuss what this initiative means for Drupal and its potential benefits for websites like yours. Lastly, I’ll provide updates on each sub-initiative, their current statuses, and ways you can contribute!

We'll kick off the Drupal In A Day Training with a session talking about Drupal. Come find out why you should consider a career in Drupal or why you might consider it for your next CMS.

If you decide it is for you, stick around for the all-day training and workshop, where we'll break out our laptops and learn Drupal site building, theming, and development.

And, there's a bonus offer from Stack Elevate that you'll not want to miss!