Session FAQs

Designing for the web is complicated. Endless screen sizes, high user expectations, and usability challenges offer up some interesting if not impossible challenges for web designers, especially when wrestling with complex functionality delivered by Drupal. Join this detailed discussion on web design and designing Drupal 8 websites.

We'll discuss in depth the largest challenge of the project - migrating links to YouTube/YT Playlist videos within body fields that open in a Colorbox modal. This involves:

Many developers, including myself, deal with mental health issues, yet mental health in the developer community is often overlooked, hidden, or swept under the rug.

Too many of us suffer in silence and end up hurting our professional and personal relationships, or even worse, ourselves. What can be done to help de-stigmatize mental health issues? How can we, as a community, band together to help those of us with mental health issues feel more welcome in tech?

Together, we can work to Erase the Stigma associated with mental illness.

How Kanban methodology places a high value on the simplicity and visual nature of project management boards to optimize workflow and delivery. 

How does it help you to

A lot of people think that in agile, we plan work just in time, that we wait until just before a sprint to do our planning. That's true but what's also true, and often ignored, is the part where you architect strategy ahead of time, getting agreement on high level what, why and how before sending work to developers.

Applying Lean & Real Life Agile to UX - What Worked and What Hasn’t

by Steve Pashley of Elsevier

Applying Lean UX in an enterprise setting requires more than just the adoption of a set of processes.

Successful implementation of Lean UX requires an organization mind shift. This discussion will focus on how we’ve attempted to  promote those shifts, and the challenges and successes we have encountered.

This session will begin with a brief history of how IT has evolved to using Agile methods – in particular, how we have evolved to using Kanban. The presentation will move forward to the core of the session – an examination of the core principles of Kanban.   The principles include a discussion around WIP and WIP Limits, as well as an examination key flow metrics.  In addition to the session content, attendees will take away information on exercises they can use with their teams, information about qualify Kanban metrics tools and forecasting tools, and

Lean & Visual Metrics

by Tom Stone of Cerner

Tom Stone will discuss his dissertation at Temple’s Fox School of Business on the impact on software development productivity of both training and coaching as well as the use of "lean" metrics in conjunction with team meetings.  Lean metrics are visual, easily understood, accessible, timely and actionable.  Scrum managers were instructed on how to use these metrics in team meeting prior to dissemination.

Testing can drive clarity and test adherence to specification, which is good, but why stop there! This session starts with how agile testing can be used to create better business cases and improve the probability that we deliver our targeted outcomes. But this talk is geared toward defining and moving our teams - both Developers and Product Owners - toward true Agility in Business Thinking.

Visual regression testing can help cut down on QA time and effort while adding a level of precision to pattern development and stylesheet refactoring. Are you dedicating valuable mental energy towards manually testing for unexpected defects in the parts of the app where you're not actively working? Do you find it hard to believe that this kind of information could be ascertained simply by looking at a picture? Come review case studies geared towards front-end and full-stack developers seeking to incorporate frameworks like PhantomCSS, BackstopJS, or Wraith into their testing toolkit.

In theory looking at Drupal 8 core modules is a great way to learn module development. In practice this can confusing because core modules must handle many edge cases and can get complicated quickly.

Programming in languages like PHP is more than learning syntax. You must learn how to outline, plan, and write code to accomplish specific goals.

This can be difficult to wrap your head around at first. We take a step out of the code through an easy-to-understand analogy which walks us through the thought process for both how to plan writing code using a programming language and how to plan writing code using a framework.

If you're interested in taking your skills beyond HTML, CSS, and/or Site Building into programming, this is where to start.

There are two types of mistakes, errors of ignorance (mistakes we make because we don’t know enough), and errors of ineptitude (mistakes we make because we don’t use of what we know). No matter how much of an expert you are, a well-designed checklist can improve outcomes. A checklist is a written guide that walks you through the key steps of a complex procedure. This session builds on popular presentations I’ve given multiple times including, “10 Steps Not To Forget After Installing Drupal” and “The Ultimate Drupal Launch Checklist” to provide tools to better manage Drupal projects.

Content authors are your users, too. With the growing presence of flexible/modular/pattern-based designs, how can you create an intuitive, inviting CMS that will thrive long after the project is done? This session looks at how to collaborate with the folks who will be in the CMS day after day. We’ll cover:

• Naming things
• Content patterns and visual patterns
• How to make abstractions concrete
• How to get content authors to practice with the CMS while you build it

Your Client has spent years building up content and even though it may need to be tweaked, they don’t want to lose it on their brand new shiny site. Enter Content Migration. For most projects, Content Migrations are an extreme hassle but also are an extremely important part of a new site. For a project to be a success its starts with the migration.

Can you not quite get Drupal to do what you want? Is your Admin side of your site a little clunky? Too many paragraph bundles that all do basically the same thing?

Working on a project that is distributed across many developers and many operating systems is challenging. Let's see how to set up uniform local environments for your Drupal, Wordpress, Node, Gatsby, Hugo, etc. project across your entire team, automate the project workflow regardless of the OS, and then re-use this automation to upgrade to continuous integration and delivery.

This session will cover:

Why Host your Own Drupal? With so many amazing hosting providers available to you, why in the world would anyone want to "self-host" in 2018?

Well, perhaps:

You don't have to go fully headless to integrate React into your site. You can use it for a page, a section, a content type, or a page component.

First I'll talk about what React is good for and when it may be a good fit or not.

I'll walk through how we used it on https://nowanthen.com using Drupal 8 and JsonAPI module.

I'll get you started with adding a custom Drupal 8 module to start connecting Drupal and React. And show the ins and outs of the JsonAPI module so you don't get stuck being seen with the core REST module.

If you haven’t explored Web Components yet, you’re missing out on a powerful tool that can greatly enhance reusability of common web elements throughout your websites and web applications. As Comcast has been updating our web properties to unify under a single UX, using Web Components with Polymer has helped make that process much more efficient.

Any Free/Libre Open Source Software project will have elements of do-ocracy (rule of those who do the work) but this approach does not work for all decisions a software community must make.

Largely of necessity in heavily volunteer-driven projects, all people who must carry out a decision have to consent to the course of action. Everyone should get a say in the direction and conditions of their work (and no one gets to say they are just following orders).

In this talk I will show that using two key numbers available to any lean agile team you can create a full set agile metrics to help identify the health of the team and areas of improvements. The methods described in this talk can be used for teams that use physical boards, as well as digital tools. They can also be used to compliment any metrics already in use by the team today and can be used at scale with team of teams. 

The pressure to innovate can be stifling. Agile methodologies can enable innovation. But without the right mindset and tools, companies can be trapped in the same rut that drove them to agile in the first place. Taking a practical approach, we will propose a model for innovation. This model can reduce the pressure to innovate and give team members breathing room to do the most creative problem solving of their lives.

Does your website create an inclusive or exclusive environment for users? Does your digital strategy incorporate web accessibility standards? Are you not sure? Let's have a conversation and find out!

In this session, we'll explore aspects of navigating the dozens of new Drupal 8 APIs, architectural decisions when planning your projects, issues management, and team coordination. We'll look at Salesforce Suite for examples of some specific APIs including:

This is NOT a session about upgrading to Drupal 8; you already want to, you already know you should, and you've already attended 32 different sessions about how. This is for the people who have projects that keep limping along in Drupal 7 and there's no time or budget in sight to upgrade. This is about limiting pain points and decreasing the amount of time you spend on regular maintenance so that you can spend more time on creating that migration plan.

Some of the pain points we'll address:

One of the key mantras in the Drupal is “there is a module for that, ” and Webform is the module for building forms for Drupal 8.

This session is going to serve as a playful exploration of the features and functionality provided by the Webform module using the “There is a this for that” approach to address requirements and solve common problems people face when building forms.

As engineers and developers, we tend to be passionate about building something great, which Drupal 8 is perfect for doing. Drupal 8 gave us more viable options for testing with tools like phpunit, Behat, and phpspec to name a few. These have opened the doors to more easily achieve a Behavior Driven Development (BDD) work flow.

If a team says they are following Kanban and lean principles, how can they show it. This experience report shows how to use and interpret metrics on scatter charts, cumulative flow diagrams, flow efficiency and other Kanban based charts and reports. By focusing on a small set of key Kanban based behaviors, team productivity can improve.

Learning Outcomes:

Agile has lots of different terms for what are really common-sense practices. 

Your most successful and fun projects had unusual things happen in them when they went well. We have heard about doing these things, thought about doing these things, and often tried doing these things.  But you probably never knew these things had names - or cool and descriptive phrases. By knowing what to call these things, they are no longer foreign and exotic.

Git has become our industry’s version control gold standard for good reason: it’s a powerful tool that facilitates collaboration. Yet, as with any powerful tool, the flexibility it affords comes with the price of complexity which, coupled with the abstract nature of the problems it aims to solve, often seems daunting to beginners.

This session will equip you with the knowledge necessary to start contributing to software projects confidently by first exploring the whats and whys before getting into the hows. Some of the topics we’ll cover include:

Drupal 8 provides a fantastic API to import and process structured data from a virtually unlimited set of sources. In this session we'll look at some common and perhaps not-so-common use cases for the Migrate API, ranging from automating repetitive tasks, to capturing constantly-changing third-party data. Some familiarity with the Migrate API will be helpful but we'll do a brief overview of the API before diving into the case studies.

In this session, we'll review best practices for writing good user stories.