DrupalCamp Twin Cities 2023

A successful team is one that can communicate with confidence. From providing mindful recommendations to clients to accurately relaying client requirements to the engineering team, having a strong understanding of Drupal is beneficial for all team members. Hear from one of our Project Managers about how their knowledge of Drupal has been beneficial, if not necessary in their roles. They will share case studies, personal experiences, and provide tips on how similar non-developer roles can confidently join the Drupal conversation.

Kelly Auxier
DIGITAL PROJECT MANAGER AT TEN7
St. Paul, MN

Kelly Auxier is a Digital Project Manager for TEN7. Prior to working at TEN7, she was a Digital Communications Strategist and Project Manager at the University of Minnesota for over ten years. Kelly is dedicated to providing the best experience for everyone on the team through her strategic experience and organizational skills.

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/getting-your-team-same-web-page-drupal-non-developers

With an estimated 400,000 sites facing the mandatory transition to Drupal 10 by 2025, there is an urgent need for efficient, time-saving solutions. Retrofit answers this call. Retrofit provides a backward compatibility layer to run your Drupal 7 code within a Drupal 10 code base.

In this session, we'll delve into the workings of Retrofit, showcasing how it allows for the smooth operation of Drupal 7 code within a Drupal 10 site.

Discover how Retrofit can help save your organization hundreds to thousands of developer hours and ensure a smooth, successful migration. Whether you're a site builder, developer, or stakeholder looking to optimize your Drupal upgrade, this session promises insightful takeaways for all. Experience the future of Drupal migration, and give your organization the advantage it deserves.

Matt Glaman
PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER AT ACQUIA
Kenosha

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/save-time-upgrading-drupal-7-drupal-10-using-retrofit

You can make cool things with open source development.

In this talk we'll walk through how we made Same Page Preview, a cool new feature for Drupal. The journey we took in order to figure out what features should be included, how we tested, how we kept momentum going to push the feature to the finish like, was a pretty cool journey.

Things that drove progress:

Collaborating online
Making update / demos to report status
Organize thoughts, build consensus, and make decisions within a small team.
"Write" tests and ensure you don't have to solve errors twice.
Hear how we learned these skills and how you could use them to build your own ideas with Open Source.

Chris Weber
Principal Software Engineer for Nerdery

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/open-source-ftw-how-we-made-same-page-preview

The transition from WordPress to Drupal can be quite a leap and often involves feeling like an imposter. I'd love to discuss the transition, the good, the bad, and the frustrating! It's often nerve-wracking to ask for help, or to learn something outside your comfort zone, however, I've found the Drupal community to be warm, inviting and happy to help. I'd love to talk about how to make the leap and how the Drupal community can help the leapers.

Jennifer Brueske
DRUPAL DEVELOPER AT NATIONWIDE IT SERVICES, INC
Becker

Jennifer has worn many hats including high school math teacher, tutor, bookkeeper, waitress, assembler of things, software QA lead, and full-stack developer. She is passionate about learning and collaboration within the technology/programming space and is a full supporter of most things geek. She loves code, Disney, and gaming.

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/wordpresser-drupal-world

With so many new features being added to CSS in the past couple years, is Sass still needed in 2023? Is it time to remove Sass from your build process? What can native CSS and PostCSS do that can replace Sass functionality and how is PostCSS being used in Drupal 10?

In this session, I will discuss an overview of new CSS features that replace functionality in Sass:
* CSS custom properties
* Nesting
* New color functions

I will also go over some PostCSS plugins that replicate Sass functionality:
* Custom media
* Imports
* Mixins

I will also briefly touch on how PostCSS is being used in Drupal 10.

Lastly, I will discuss when you might not want to replace Sass *just yet* and how you can use Sass AND native CSS together to take advantage of your existing build process.

It’s an exciting time to be a CSS developer and the perfect time to learn more about what CSS can do natively without using Sass.

Aubrey Sambor
LEAD ENGINEER AT LULLABOT
Western Massachusetts, USA

Aubrey is a front-end developer who loves creating accessible websites using clean and modern CSS. She initially learned to code in the late 90s when her high school friends told her about this cool website called Geocities. She decided she wanted a site of her own, so she bought an HTML 4 book and taught herself the ways of code. Aubrey graduated from Indiana University with a computer science degree and started her career building custom PHP web portals for clients, eventually discovering Drupal in 2008.

Aubrey is a frequent attendee at Drupal events, enjoys contributing to the Drupal community, and is passionate about design systems, accessibility, and the latest and greatest CSS techniques.

In her spare time, Aubrey loves to knit, spin her own yarn on one of her two spinning wheels, and walk on the many trails and paths throughout western Massachusetts. She's left-handed and has always disliked it when her classmates took all the left-handed scissors in art class.

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/do-you-still-need-sass-2023

Migrating Drupal websites can be a daunting task, but fret not! In this engaging session, you'll delve into the exciting world of Drupal migrations and discover how to harness the power of ChatGPT to turbocharge your development process.

Join us as we embark on a journey through the intricacies of Drupal migrations. Learn expert tips and tricks to streamline your migration workflow, from data mapping and content transformation to module updates and database management. This session goes beyond the basics, delving into advanced techniques that will elevate your migration game.

But that's not all—prepare to be amazed as we unveil the magic of ChatGPT as your trusted companion. Witness how ChatGPT revolutionizes the way you code, effortlessly assisting you in finding solutions, suggesting best practices, and even predicting potential roadblocks. Say goodbye to tedious manual searches and embrace the power of AI to save time and accelerate your development process.

Whether you're a seasoned Drupal developer or a curious enthusiast, this session equips you with the tools and knowledge to master Drupal migrations like a pro. Be prepared for hands-on demos, interactive exercises, and real-world examples that will inspire you to unlock new levels of efficiency and success.

Don't miss this opportunity to make your Drupal migrations more interesting, useful, and enjoyable. Join us to supercharge your development workflow with the formidable duo of Drupal migrations and ChatGPT.

Matt Kleve
SENIOR DEVELOPER AT LULLABOT
Holyoke, Colorado

Matt Kleve enjoys working with Drupal performance and scalability. He's been a Drupal Developer for over 16 years, and currently the host of the Lullabot Podcast.

Prior to Lullabot Matt worked for the Alumni Association of the Air Force Academy, managing the web/IT team. It was there that he started using Drupal in 2007. He quickly became the resident Drupal expert, leveraging Drupal to integrate various parts of their data/technology. Prior to finding Drupal, Matt was on the local news scene working for a TV station as a reporter and a photographer. Matt grew up on the family farm in Northeast Colorado where they grew wheat and corn. His other marketable skills include: driving a tractor, fixing a fence, raising pigs, and welding!

Today, Matt not only works at Lullabot, but also helps run his family farm with his wife, Charlee, and their two boys.

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/supercharging-drupal-migrations-chatgpt-unleashing-efficiency-and-enhancing-development

When a closely knit and well experienced government team build their first Drupal site and then launch it on their own hosting, they run into unforeseen yet surmountable obstacles. Come with me as we go on a journey and learn how this team improved their Drupal Systems — from the site’s user experience and tagging strategy to the automation at AWS — in only six months.

This talk is suitable for people with or without Drupal experience. It will address:

the very real challenges that result from a fast migration to a new platform on a tight timeline
how we helped the Minnesota Department of Health overcome these challenges
how we’ve started paying down technical debt by optimizing Drupal for best practices
how strict security requirements can be your friend and that automation and speed are still possible
the secret to achieving all of this, with every team, every time
We hope that this talk inspires teams that may be in a similar situation to reach out and ask for help — whether in government or not, Drupal Systems can be nimble and transformations fast.

Ivan Stegic
CEO AT TEN7
Minneapolis, MN

Ivan Stegic has always been driven by purpose. Growing up in South Africa, moving to Minnesota, and eventually founding TEN7, Ivan has forged his own path with a goal to make the world a better place.

A physicist by training, Ivan moved to the United States after college, working long hours in research and engineering roles. He burned out, realizing he was spending too much time and energy at work and not enough with his family.

He decided to make a change, letting passion be his guide. He knew he liked working online, solving problems, and making connections. He started doing website development projects for clients, ended up hiring some team members to help, and TEN7 was born!

Ivan lives in Minneapolis with his wife, kids and two dogs. He’s a huge Minnesota Twins fan; a relentless ambassador for technology, science, and common sense; and an eternal optimist.

At TEN7, Ivan is a purveyor of positivity, working with clients and hiring team members who share his desire to Make Things That Matter.

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/creating-nimble-drupal-systems-government-transforming-mns-dept-health-6-months

Markdown is very popular for authors, developers, and technical writers. It's lightweight and straightforward to learn. Its open format allows it to be used across environments and tools. And with some Markdown features moving into CKEditor 5, its relevance in Drupal is stronger than ever.

In this talk, we'll cover the basics of the whys and focus on learning the syntax of Markdown so you can get started using Markdown immediately.

3 takeaways

• Markdown can be easily converted to HTML
• Markdown text can be used in most platforms and environments
• Markdown has a very gentle learning curve

AmyJune Hineline
CERTIFICATE COMMUNITY ARCHITECT AT THE LINUX FOUNDATION
Santa Cruz, CA

AmyJune currently works with the Linux Foundation as their Certificate Community Architect. She is responsible for supporting the Certification team’s efforts in building and maintaining exams and related documentation for exam products in the Linux Foundation’s certification portfolio.

She is a Drupal core mentor. She has the unique privilege of being a non-code developer and has the ability to bridge the gap between the technical writers, the coders, the developers, and the designers and connect them with first-time contributors with skill sets that match their specific contribution needs. AmyJune helps communities discover how they can contribute and belong in more ways than code.

Her ongoing experience as a hospice nurse keeps her in touch with the challenges faced by many end-users. In her continued efforts to make a difference, she helps organize A11yTalks, an online meetup that advocates all things accessibility - one of the core components of building an inclusive web.

Outside of her mission in the technology community space, she has a deep love for mycology, geocaching, and air-cooled Volkswagens. Her ability to spell diarrhea without the aid of spell check has won the hearts of millions.

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/markdown-minutes

When a decoupled project begins one of the hardest parts that I’ve found is setting up a local environment to simulate all of the necessary components. How will the CMS be served? How will the decoupled front end be displayed? What about the dev server for rendering previews? Can I still call it headless or is decoupled the only appropriate word?

There is a better way! In this session I will be walking you through a setup that I use that incorporates separate servers for a Gatsby static site, a Drupal CMS site, and a development server running on NodeJS. Best of all, because it’s container based, it’s extremely portable and can be reused for multiple projects! Ready to learn more?

JD Flynn
SOFTWARE ENGINEER
LaPorte, IN

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/decoupled-drupal-dev-docker-docksal-doing-dirty-work

Automated accessibility scanning tools can only catch around 30% of accessibility issues. To fully meet accessibility standards and make sure everyone is able to use your site, manual testing with assistive technologies is required. We will provide an overview of common manual testing methodologies and demonstrate simple keyboard and screen reader checks you can use to get started. We will also share resources to help you assess the accessibility of your sites. Familiarity with accessibility standards and automated accessibility tools is helpful but not required. These methods are applicable to both Drupal and non-Drupal sites.

Luke Kudryashov
SENIOR DIGITAL ACCESSIBILITY ANALYST AT UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
Minneapolis, MN

Luke is the Senior Digital Accessibility Analyst at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Disability Resource Center. He has a background in digital accessibility, user experience, disability studies, and disability culture.

Khaled Musa
ACADEMIC TECHNOLOGIST, ACCESSIBILITY FOCUSED AT UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
Fridley

As an Academic Technologist, focused on Accessibility Khaled consult with faculty and staff about technology tools with a lens on how to create an accessible and inclusive learning environment. Khaled has over 15 years’ experience designing program curricula, teaching computer applications, writing user documentation, and conducting accessibility testing.

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/introduction-manual-accessibility-testing

When you think of live-streaming, images of excitable gamers in fast-paced First-Person-Shooters may come to mind. However, there's a lesser-known and growing community of live-coders emerging on platforms like Twitch and YouTube Live. These live-coders are learning and building software in public, using languages ranging from C++ to JavaScript to php. Join me and explore how live-coding can be a powerful tool to become a better programmer.

During the first half of this session, I'll share my personal journey into the world of live-coding. I'll discuss the challenges I encountered and, more importantly, the myriad of benefits I've experienced as a streamer. From creating an engaged and supportive community to establishing an incredible professional network, live-coding has provided me significant value. I'll delve into how I connected with developers who built the very libraries and tools I use, and how stream chat has proven to be an exceptional "rubber-duck" debugging tool. Additionally, I'll reveal how live-coding has transformed my approach to software development, enhanced my problem-solving skills, and boosted my confidence as both a software developer and a communicator.

For those eager to try live-coding themselves, the second half of this session will focus on getting started. We'll explore the essential software and hardware required, and I'll guide you through the setup process. You'll discover the various platforms suitable for streaming your coding sessions and learn what activities to undertake during your initial streams. I'll also share insights on growing an engaged community and creating an environment conducive to learning and collaboration.

Join me for this unique session and see the potential of live-coding as a tool to elevate your programming skills. Whether you're a seasoned programmer or learning your first language, there's something valuable for everyone in the world of live-coding both as a streamer and as a viewer.

Mark Dobossy
DOBOSSY CONSULTING, LLC
Rosemount, MN

Mark is the owner of and senior developer for a custom software consultancy focusing on mobile logistics for small-to-medium construction companies through a large Angular/Ionic app. Prior to his current position, he built subsurface flow simulators to guide reservoir engineers and web-based financial portfolio optimization tools.

Being a believer in learning and developing in public, he live-streams his daily professional programming work and hobby coding projects on Twitch. Downhill skiing is one of the few activities he enjoys more than coding and he is always looking for ways to bring together coding, tech, streaming, and skiing.

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/building-public-how-live-streaming-software-development-can-supercharge-your-programming

Single Directory Components (SDC) are a new feature in Drupal core (as of 10.1) that aim to simplify the front-end development workflow and improve the maintainability of custom, Core, and contributed themes. This is the biggest change to Drupal theming since the introduction of Twig with the release of Drupal 8 over 10 years ago. And it’s super awesome!

In this presentation I’ll cover:

What are UI components generally, and Single Directory Components specifically?
What problems are SDC solving?
Examples of how to author, and use, components in your modules and themes
Integrating SDC with Storybook
Educated guesses about the future of SDC in Drupal core

Joe Shindelar
LEAD DEVELOPER / LEAD TRAINER AT DRUPALIZE.ME
Minneapolis, MN

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/single-directory-components

This keynote traces Drupal's evolution from its modest beginnings as Dries’s dorm room experiment to its current stature as a leading open-source content management system. It will explore the role of Drupal’s passionate global community and its expansive digital ecosystem in driving the innovations that have fueled the project’s impact and success over the last two decades. After exploring where we’ve been and where we are now, Tiffany will share where she sees Drupal, as a project and a community, going next.

Tiffany Farriss is the CEO of Palantir.net, an agile open source consultancy solving complex challenges for large institutional nonprofits and public sector clients. The longest standing member of the Drupal Association Board of Directors (other than Dries), Tiffany is currently serving as its Secretary.

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/schedule/day-1

Do you aspire to contribute to the Drupal community but are unsure what to expect? Have you read the documentation and feel like you still don't know how or where to contribute?

This session will help you fill in the gaps in the documentation as you make your journey as a first-time contributor. We will explore topics such as issue queue management, the credit system, invisible priorities, and how to make the most of your experience.

Help avoid pitfalls and stress, and increase your readiness for the road ahead by hearing stories and learning from the mistakes of fellow contributors.

Matthew Tift
LEAD ENGINEER AT LULLABOT

Dr. Matthew Tift is a lead engineer at Lullabot. He has been writing and presenting regularly at academic and professional conferences for over two decades.

An active member of the Drupal community, Matthew was a Drupal 8 configuration system co-maintainer, organizer of the Twin Cities DrupalCamp since 2011, and Drupal core contributor since 2010. He helped port multiple key public media Drupal modules to Drupal 8, including the NPR and PBS Media Manager modules, and helped organize the effort for Olivero, the new theme for Drupal 9.

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/habits-effective-drupal-contributor

In January 2020, The University of Minnesota Libraries developed and applied a principles-based design system to their Health Sciences Library website. Refining this design, we subsequently launched the main University Libraries site in June 2021. With the design system at its center, this site was built with elegantly accessible semantic HTML-focused code on Drupal 9 with highly curated and considered content, striving to meet and exceed WCAG 2.1 AA guidance and addressing cognitive and learning considerations through the use of plain language, templated pages for consistent page-level organization, and no hidden content. As a result, the site better supports all users regardless of their abilities, attention level, mental status, reading level, and reliability of their internet connection, all of which are especially critical now as an elevated number of people experience crises, anxieties, and depression.

At the technical core of this implementation is a Drupal theme designed to accommodate modular, Paragraphs-based editing while directing rendered output through component-based design elements. This session will draw heavily from the article "Considered Content: a Design System for Equity, Accessibility, and Sustainability" published in the Code4Lib Journal in February 2021, but will focus instead on the implementation for www.lib.umn.edu (rather than the article's focus on hsl.lib.umn.edu). This session will focus heavily on details of the Drupal implementation (theme and supporting modules), while providing much of the same background information as the referenced article.

Presenters from University of Minnesota Libraries
Amy Drayer, user interface developer
jen neveau, web content strategist
Gabe Ormsby, web applications developer

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/implementing-accessibility-focused-design-system-drupal

Your site is working great on the LIVE server. But now you need to make considerable changes to your site. You copy your site locally, make a bunch of changes, and push those changes to LIVE. But now modules you installed locally are running on the LIVE site.

What a mess, HELP!

Drupal gives us great tools to control and manage configuration. With config_split, config_ignore and config_filter modules, we can set up development workflows to enable and disable modules and configuration - based on which development environment you are using.

In this session we will explore those modules and show how to set up different configuration for the same site running on the server and on a local development environment.

This is an intermediate session, but if you are new to config management, this will be a great session to attend. We'll demystify what Drupal can do with your configuration!

Wilbur Ince
DRUPAL MECHANIC AT ELECTRIC CITIZEN
Minneapolis, MN

Based in Minneapolis, Wilbur Ince works for Electric Citizen. Drupal Mechanics are fixers and troubleshooters, called upon to keep fix issues and keep things running smoothly. Wilbur has been a long-time Twin Cities Drupal group member and part of the Twin Cities DrupalCamp since it's start in 2011.

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/config-management-local-development-config-splits

Drupal is made up of many small libraries of code. Composer is the PHP library that helps many PHP projects, including Drupal, manage all those libraries. In Drupal 9 and 10, Composer is used in Drupal core and it is expected that you will use Composer to manage your Drupal site's code.

In this session, we will go over what Composer does and how to use it, especially for Drupal site builders/developers. This includes how to use Composer to add and update modules to your site. We will also touch on more advanced usage such as custom repositories, applying patches, and unmet dependencies. We should have time for questions and sharing your favorite Composer tips and tricks as well.

Dan Ficker
STAFF CUSTOMER SUCCESS ENGINEER AT PANTHEON
St. Paul, MN

For nearly two decades, Dan Ficker has been using Drupal for work and fun. Over those years, he has built and managed podcasts, music review websites, e-commerce stores, churche websites, and much more. In the last few years, he provides technical support for customers of the Pantheon hosting and developer tools platform and enjoys helping customers solve their issues with Drupal and WordPress.

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/de-mystifying-composer

Drupal founder Dries Buytaert once claimed that Drupal is for ambitious digital experiences. But ambition doesn't always skew large. While availability and affordability of high-speed internet access is improving worldwide, many still access the web on sub-3G connections, or under the constraint of data caps. With the median page weight across the web now breaching two megabytes, the digital team at Human Rights Watch wanted to chart a course in the opposite direction: find a way to deliver the full weight of our reporting, in as few bytes as possible.

In this session, we'll peek under the hood of HRW Text Version, a full-featured alternative browsing experience for HRW.org that's 1% of the size and 100% built in Drupal. We'll answer appropriately compact questions, including:

1. Why?
2. How?
3. How long?
4. Did it hurt?
5. Can I?

Answers: (1) Reach & accessibility; (2) Theme negotiation; (3) Astonishingly quickly; (4) A little; (5) Yes!

Les Lim
WEB DEVELOPER AT HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
Minneapolis

Les is more than just a pithy aphorism! Once an organizer of Twin Cities Drupal Camp, Les has been a supporter and promoter of Drupal since version 4.7. After over a decade of developer experience for (seemingly) half of the Drupal agencies in Minneapolis, he now works on the Digital team at Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental organization that investigates and reports on abuses happening in all corners of the world.

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/less-more-adventures-text-only-drupal

Funded as part of the Pitchburg Innovation Contest, The Drupal API Client project aims to assemble a group of contributors in order to combine the best of existing Drupal API clients into a set of utilities that can both address common use cases with little configuration, and also be extended to support the needs of a diverse JavaScript ecosystem.

At Twin Cities Drupal Camp, we'd like to introduce you to the project, including:

Why we believe that this is an important problem to solve for the Drupal community.
A tour of past projects that helped pave the way for our work.
An overview of the initial scope of the project.
A look at our progress thus far.
Areas where we need feedback.
Details on how you can contribute.
Excited to get hands on with the API Client Project? The fun will continue at Twin Cities Drupal Camp contribution day.

Brian Perry
Chicago, IL

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/drupal-api-client-project

In the 2020s, the fourth decade of website deployments, teams are recombining, repeating, and re-imagining the patterns of the previous three decades.

In the 1990s, dedicated trailblazers created novel and disparate modes of getting sites online. For many teams in this era, just getting a site on the World Wide Web at all was good enough.

In the 2000s, the LAMP stack emerged as an industry standard pattern for uniting the work of developers, designers, content editors, and systems administrators. The monoliths of the 2000s provided a baseline of stability, pace-of-change, and collaboration, which again was "good enough."

In the 2010s, expectations climbed (primarily in response to competition from native mobile applications). "Good enough" was no longer good enough. Each specialty (front-end development, IT, designers, etc) found that they could pursue excellence in their discipline by breaking away from monolithic deployments.

Now, a third of the way into the 2020s the zeitgeist of website deployments moves again.

Part history lesson, part sketch comedy show, this session will trace the economic, social, political, and technological forces that shape how people build and deploy websites. Teams that understand the forces that shaped the previous decades of evolution will better plan and execute for the changes in the 2020s.

Steve Persch
DIRECTOR, DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE AT PANTHEON
Minneapolis

Steve is a developer with 17 years of experience building WordPress and Drupal sites. While interning at a theatre company in college, Steve overheard the artistic director say they needed a blog and an online magazine. Steve volunteered to build the sites and WordPress 2.0.4 got the job done. His path was changed and he's been making websites ever since.

As a freelance and agency developer, built sites for a range of clients including The Joffrey Ballet, Foreign Affairs, Marketplace, Public Radio International, and many higher education institutions. You can find patches from Steve all over Drupal core and contributed modules.

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/fourth-decade-website-deployments

Drupal 7 is nearing end of life and some Drupal 7 sites simply don't need modern Drupal and are unlikely to make the switch. Backdrop CMS is strong alternative for many of these sites. Backdrop CMS is a fork of Drupal that very much resembles Drupal 7, but has added a new layout system and some modern Drupal features, such as config management and views in core.

There is an upgrade path from Drupal 7 to Backdrop that is similar to the Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 upgrade path. In this session we'll briefly introduce Backdrop CMS and how it compares to Drupal and walk you through the steps to plan, prepare, and complete a Drupal 7 to Backdrop CMS upgrade.

Tim Erickson

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/upgrading-drupal-7-backdrop-cms

Local development has been an unsolved problem since the days of MAMP, XAMPP and BAMP. This problem has been tackled over and over by some of our smartest engineers but the state of the art hasn't advanced much beyond a bundle of scripts duct-taped together and maintained in-between real work. It's 2023 and setting up your workstation for a new project and sharing config between developers is still a hit or miss prospect.

In this session we'll look at a new approach to local development that uses containers and config-as-code best practices to define everything about the local operating environment from software versions to IDE plugins.

By defining our tech stack in code we can create a Drupal site repository that can be spun up by any developer on any Windows, Mac or Linux machine and including fully configured and working versions of our favorite development tools such as XDebug, Lighthouse and PHPMyAdmin.

Using Microsoft's Dev Container standard we will create a config that can create a fully functional devlopment stack locally with just VS Code and Docker Desktop or in the cloud using Github Codespaces.

We will also look at how a fully defined runtime environment can improve security, ease deployments and reduce maintenance costs by locking down the production environment to only the software that is needed to run Drupal and nothing more.

Ronan Dowling
ENGINEERING LEADER AT FREELANCE
Eagan, MN

Ronan has been hacking on Drupal in the Twin Cities since Drupal 4.7. He's the author of multiple well used contrib module including (in)famous Backup and Migrate.

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/reliable-no-config-local-development-using-dev-containers

What’s the first thing you think of when someone is called “mentally ill”? Many probably imagine someone unkempt, babbling incoherently on the street or locked up in an asylum.

I am mentally ill, but despite my multiple diagnoses, I am a functional member of society. I’ve been able to deal with my mental illness with treatment, support, and lots of work, and if you’re suffering from mental illness, chances are that you can as well.

In this session I will tell the tale of how I discovered that my feelings of worthlessness and dread were more than just bad moods and how I came to accept that I have mental illness, but mental illness doesn’t have me. By telling what helped me, I hope that attendees will be able to recognize signs within themselves or those they care about and find ways to get help, accept that mental illness is not a damning diagnosis, and get past the stigma that surrounds people with mental illness.

JD Flynn
SOFTWARE ENGINEER
LaPorte, IN

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/i-am-functional-and-so-can-you

You like to keep all your Drupal website code in Github (GUIs for PRs! Clear code diffs! Searchability! Visibility within your organization!), but hosting partners like Pantheon and Acquia have their own Git repositories that tie into their deployment processes. This session will walk you through taking an existing Github Drupal repository and automatically deploying any updates to that repository's main branch (eg, by merging in a pull request) to a Pantheon dev environment.

(As of August 2023) Github accounts include 2000 minutes of Github actions execution minutes for private repositories, and Pantheon's Silver plan is also free. So if you'd like to reproduce what I'm showing to explore the possibilities for your own websites, you can do so at no cost.

Gena Wilson
PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER AT DEPT (AGENCY)
Chicago, IL

Gena (said like "Jenna") Wilson is enthusiastic about impossible meat, distance running, and of course Drupal! She's been working with Drupal since 2012, and was pleased that D8 finally made her learn how to use preprocess functions (instead of putting PHP in the template files). Although she's seen many websites through to their successful launches, her favorite is probably a tiny forum site she created for all the owners in her condo building to talk to each other. She lives near the lakefront in Chicago with her cat.

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/using-github-actions-continuous-deployment

Your clients are hungry! Their end users are hungry! Time to cook up some Drupal, but it needs to be fast! Caching is often a complex and confusing topic which leads to many mistakes and misconceptions which can drag down your project’s velocity. Put on your chef’s hat, as we’ll cover several key recipes to keep your clients satisfied.

Tess Flynn
TEN7
Minneapolis

Kelly Auxier
DIGITAL PROJECT MANAGER AT TEN7
St. Paul, MN

Kelly Auxier is a Digital Project Manager for TEN7. Prior to working at TEN7, she was a Digital Communications Strategist and Project Manager at the University of Minnesota for over ten years. Kelly is dedicated to providing the best experience for everyone on the team through her strategic experience and organizational skills.

https://2023.tcdrupal.org/session/cooking-caching-drupal-code-served-fast