Agenda

Registration will start at 8am. We'll have a full continental breakfast including coffee, pastries, and fruit. 

Join us for introductions and our camp photo!

What happens when the web team drifts apart?
What happens when they lose sight of shared goals?
Everyone optimizes their own chart.
Each role maximizes their own controls.

Hear the story of a new stakeholder
Who asks for a seemingly simple tweak
And is answered by a chain of scolders,
Each too siloed to find what they all seek.

This session will examine dynamics
Present in nearly all web teams trying
To balance many different metrics
Without clear guidance. And without crying.

Before you get lost in the WebOps weeds,
Navigate the hierarchy of needs.

At UMN we are running large multi-site instances that share a codebase. Many customers downstream of us build with the design system we develop and others create custom-developed solutions that build upon our components.

To continually deliver quality work while avoiding regressions for our customers, we implemented both visual regression tests using BackstopJS and end-to-end functional tests with Cypress. This allows us to develop enhancements to our features and catch issues without relying on the slow manual testing process. We also made our tooling available to our customers to use with their custom solutions.

We would like to share this process and talk about the benefits of automated regression testing.

Thank you!

Every day, visitors send and receive data from your web site. We know it is secure if the web developers are using industry standard practices, but how does it work?

On modern websites, pretty much every bit of communication between a visitor and each website is encrypted for the security of the site owners and visitors. And when you use a password to log in to a Drupal site, the site doesn’t know your password; they only store an encrypted version of the password. In this session, we will explain in not-too-technical language how these technologies work. We will also talk about other things Drupal does to provide security like salting hashes, login form limiting, etc.

After this session, you will understand the basics of how data on websites is secured and why it is smart to use standard practices for best security. We will also talk about resources for improving security further on your site, if desired.

One of the key elements of the Starshot Initiative is the rapidly evolving system for Recipes. Designed to accelerate site-building, recipes will help people new to Drupal to solve for common needs, and for users of all skill levels to quickly build out content architectures using best practices.

This talk will discuss the elements that make up a recipe, how to use recipes, and what new capabilities are still in development. We'll also do a deep dive into the Events recipe and its available add-ons, allowing you meet even complex requirements quickly and without custom code.

Come One, Come All! I built a theme system using taxonomy, configuration and preprocessors. Why you ask?! To create a Pantheon upstream site that has all the components needed for a content editor to start building a downstream site without the need for further development while getting all the brand colors you need. Using this system a second site was built and launched within 30 days of the first site.

This code walk thru is for Site Builders, Full Stack Developers and Themers. We will walk thru the configuration setup and thought process of the Taxonomy, Content Types and Components; stroll over the inspector to investigate the page, css variables and components; and finally we will  dive into the preprocesses and logic that tie it all together.

As you leave, I hope you will have gained the insight into why and how you could build a dynamic theme system and the inspiration to dream and build your own interconnecting ambitious system.

The contract is signed, the project team is defined, and goals are set. So you’re probably thinking, let’s kick the project off. Although it’s exciting to jump in and make progress on a new project, there’s a lot to think about before getting started.

Successful projects are a result of great partnerships, and it’s important to establish a strong project team and be on the same page from the start. In this session, we’ll cover the importance of:

• Business and client team building
• Encouraging Trust through transparency and delivery
• Empowering decision-makers with a discovery-first approach
• Performing phased projects to deliver success when dealing with high-risk and uncertainty

Synopsis

In the tech agency space, agencies may perform poorly because they act as a "middle man" instead of a "facilitator". Whether you’re an agency or work with one, join us to learn the best practices for successful project management and a successful agency partnership.

Learning objectives

At the end of this session, attendees will be able to host valuable and transparent team-building activities with their partner businesses and produce successful projects.

Content focus area

Leadership, Management & Business

Target audience

This session is for project teams (both at an agency and within an organization) who are interested in effectively managing projects from the start.

Prerequisites

Attendees will get the most out of this session by being familiar with business-client relationships.

Keynote speaker - Preston So

Universal CMS: The next generation of content management systems

Workspaces fills a longstanding gap in the Drupal core content management lifecycle for site managers needing to create, review, approve, and publish groups of content simultaneously. With Drupal 11, we now (finally!) have a way to easily stage multiple content changes for your site and publish them all together, when ready. 

This session is geared toward Drupal content managers, site builders, and site administrators who want to learn more about this new functionality in Drupal 11. The session will cover:

• General overview of Workspaces and common use cases that it addresses
• Explore multiple approaches to leveraging Workspaces for content management
• Review how Workspaces fits into content management workflows
• Discuss current limitations of Workspaces and potential workarounds

A modern Drupal development environment enables the developer to work at peak efficiency to create sustainable code that meets modern coding standards and is bug-free (hopefully!) By leveraging a modern IDE like Visual Studio Code, along with a recommended set of extensions and configuring, one can put themselves in a position to succeed. 

This session will demonstrate how to set up Visual Studio Code to work with DDEV and a number of code quality tools to maximize a developer's efficiency. This includes integrating phpcs, phpcbf, PhpStan, and PHPUnit with Visual Studio Code's interface as well as making it easy to run PHPUnit tests directly from the Visual Studio Code interface. Furthermore, guidance will be provided on how to configure Xdebug with Visual Studio Code.

Attendees of this session will leave with the knowledge necessary to configure their copy of Visual Studio Code as will be demonstrated in the session. 

So much of our lives is spent working. We talk about work/life balance. And sometimes we talk about harder things, like Imposter Syndrome, or burnout, or "mental health". But we rarely talk about mental illness or about how our emotions affect our lives and our work.

At the root of Imposter Syndrome is shame. Shame is a complex emotion. And, in addition to imposter syndrome and burnout, shame can lead to a myriad of problems in our work lives: cycles of procrastination then frenzied work, avoiding work issues, poor boundaries, reduced problem solving ability, black and white thinking, criticism, and abusive behavior. Sometimes we may not even recognize that we are feeling shame while it is affecting our behaviors.

Despite what Instagram ads may say, there is no easy, 1-minute fix. But understanding the complexities of shame has helped me to begin to navigate these issues and start to heal. We cannot be afraid to talk about shame.

In this session, we will:

• define shame, imposter syndrome, burnout, etc.
• discuss what causes shame
• analyze how shame works
• seek solutions

Do you understand how Drupal's configuration system is supposed to work? Do you ever experience inconsistencies between environments? Are you interested in building a best-practice continuous integration and deployment solution with configuration validation? This session, led by a 10-year maintainer of Drupal's configuration system, will focus on how the configuration management system is designed to work, explore its integration with continuous integration systems, identify common configuration pitfalls, and discuss how initiatives like Recipes will enhance the robustness of your site's configuration.

In 2017, the University of Minnesota began an ambitious project to initiate an evolving design system made up of modular components that can be combined in numerous ways to make creative and consistent University websites. A collaborative effort across departments led by University Relations, the Folwell theme is now in use across hundreds of University of Minnesota Drupal websites and continues its evolution.  

This presentation will review the history of this effort, the evolution of Folwell over time, and will include a demo of some components and sites. We will walk through the development process from feature request to production release. Finally, we will discuss some of the challenges we’ve encountered, and provide a sneak peek into plans for Folwell 2.0.

How can a group of thousands of people talk about and decide anything?  How's this 'community' concept supposed to work at scale, even in theory?

Any Free/Libre Open Source Software project will have elements of do-ocracy (rule of those who do the work), but not all decisions should devolve to implementors.  A better ideal is that decisions should be made by the people who are most affected.

Particularly when a decision strongly impacts more than those who carry it out, we need better ways of making decisions that give everyone their say.  This starts by letting people by heard by everyone else.  Fortunately, we can scale conversations and decisions in a fair and truly democratic way.

• Learn why meritocracy ("rule of those with merit") is a bogus and harmful concept.
• Gain a passing familiarity with various ways decisions are or have been made in Drupal and other projects.
• Add sociocracy and sortition to your vocabulary and understand how these esoteric concepts can help our community scale.
• Get introduced to (and give feedback on) Visions Unite, non-Drupal free software for mass communication mediated by the participants.

The most important things we have to do need to be done together.  And our work together is most powerful when we make decisions about it together.

This session is for people working on developing large communities about Drupal, with Drupal, or otherwise— or existing in society.

Join the group for an hour of fast-paced and fun 5 minute presentations. Sign up ahead of time if you want to be one of the presenters, or just sit back and enjoy the hour.

Learn more about Lightning Talks

Sign up for a 5 minute slot!

Gather in the West Wing for some social time to end the day. We'll be providing appetizers and a cash bar, open to all attendees! 

Why contribute?

The more that people contribute, the stronger Drupal becomes. The more polished and refined the project is, the more job security we all have.

Why sprint?

It’s an excellent opportunity to connect with other contributors, help collaborate and brainstorm, and move the Drupal project forward. Contributing is a fantastic way to receive feedback and build skills while learning from those more experienced.

Not a coder or new to tech?

That’s great! It’s your turn to shine.

Not everyone who works on Drupal is a developer: Project Managers, Customer Service, and those who hold non-technical roles can all give back to the community. Code is important, but so are all the other parts.

We got you covered!

There will be mentors available for those who need a little help to get started.

We will make sure you stay caffeinated, fed, and hydrated.

Take a break, relax, catch your breath!