Downtown LA Drupal meetup at Oversee on April 19, 2011

You are invited to the next DTLA (Downtown Los Angeles) Drupal meetup on April 19, 2011, We're meeting at the offices of at Oversee.net on April 19, 2011 in Downtown Los Angeles. There will be several presentations as well as open discussions, job announcements and time for networking.

Join us for a Drupal After Dark afterward at Weiland's Brewery Underground. Plus, Weiland's will validate your parking to reduce your parking to just $3, so come by any time after 4pm for food, a drink or just to get your parking validated.

How to prepare for the meetup

Just bring your laptop, a power adapter and any other cables you usually use. Food, drinks and wireless Internet are being provided by our sponsor. Thanks, Oversee!

This event is free and no RSVP is required. To breeze through security, however, you can sign up by logging in and clicking the Sign up button below. All who sign up will also have instructions and last-minute details (if there are any) emailed to them before the meeting.

Be sure to update your profile with your full name so that a name badge will be ready for you at the front desk. To do this, log in and click My Account → Edit → Personal and fill in the "Real name" field. This is optional, but it makes things much easier for the event organizers and our venue sponsor. In any case, please be prepared to show a valid photo ID at the front desk.

We want your feedback!

During the meetup, we'll be gathered in the #drupal-la IRC channel and all are welcome to join us. The event organizers will also be checking Twitter for feedback and questions that mention @ladrupal or use the #ladrupal hashtag.

Agenda

If you'd like to give a presentation, announce a job position or ask any questions of the group, please come a few minutes early or leave a comment below. If presenting, be sure to bring your laptop (and power and display cables) and whatever else you need.

   Job announcements and open Q&A

Everyone has a problem every now and then and the open Q&A session is a chance for attendees to divine answers from the collective wisdom of the group. This is also an opportunity for local businesses to make job announcements and ask for referrals and recommendations.

   Presentations

John N. Marchesini (@TechCeleb), Sr. Product Manager at The Hollywood Reporter, will give a case study / demo of THR's new Drupal site that they launched in October, 2010.

Additional presentations will be announced soon. Either follow @ladrupal on Twitter or click the Sign up button below (or both!) to be notified when the agenda has been updated.

   Raffle prizes! Collect them all! Must be present to win!

Raffle prizes this month include software licenses, high performance hosting and Drupal books, and are provided courtesy of:

• Emma Jane Hogbin (@emmajanedotnet)
  Emma Jane is a noteworthy author and public speaker and is the producer of Design to Theme.
• Exaltation of Larks (@LarksLA)
  Exaltation of Larks is a long-time LA Drupal sponsor and offers Drupal development, training and consulting services in Los Angeles and beyond.
• Pantheon (@Pantheon_Drupal)
  Pantheon is a high performance Drupal hosting and development platform. From running cron to deploying from dev to live, Pantheon makes developers' lives easier.
• Pearson Education (@PearsonEd)
  Pearson is the publisher of several popular Drupal books, including Front End Drupal (by Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Käfer) and Visual QuickStart Guide (by Tom Geller).

LA Drupal is a volunteer organization and we depend on the generosity of our sponsors and members in our community. Ways to help us include volunteering your time, sponsoring our events and making physical and financial donations. Please speak with an organizer at this meetup or see http://groups.drupal.org/la/sponsorship for more information.

   Lightning talks

We have time as well for lightning talks, which are 5-10 minute presentations from attendees who would like to share something with the group. If you'd like to give a lightning talk, be sure to come a few minutes early and bring your laptop (and power and display cables) and whatever else you need.

   MySQL tuning: identifying and improving slow queries

Ashok Modi (@BTMash) will talk about a site he worked on that had a slow page load. He identified a very slow MySQL query that took 1.5-2 seconds to execute, examined the query, had it explained and figured out how to speed it up to about .05 seconds, making the site much zippier.

   Drupal Gardens tour

Benno Sebastian (@kingofprinting) will give us a tour of Drupal Gardens, the hosted Drupal 7 service from Acquia that is to Drupal as WordPress.com is to WordPress. Benno will share what he has learned after building several sites with Drupal Gardens, including which features are available in Gardens and any gotchas that people should know.

As always, please feel welcome to leave a comment below and let others know what you'd like to present ahead of time.

Location

We're meeting at the offices of Oversee.net in Downtown Los Angeles at 515 S. Flower St. (Suite 4400), Los Angeles, CA 90071. Oversee.net owns a large portfolio of online properties, including Moniker, SnapNames, DomainSponsor, AboutAirportParking.com and LowFares.com, to name a few, and is using Drupal extensively for their emerging businesses division.

Oversee.net is hiring a Senior PHP/Drupal Developer to join them in Downtown Los Angeles. To learn more about Oversee.net and their open positions, come to the meetup or visit Oversee.net/careers.

Travel

Our venue is easily accessible by bus (see mta.net for bus lines) and by commuter rail (the Red Line connection is Pershing Square and the Blue Line connection is 7th and Wilshire).

Parking

Presenters and organizers will receive free parking. If you'd like to present for 20-30 minutes on a topic or help organize this meetup, please contact the organizers or post a comment below.

This meetup is in Downtown Los Angeles and there is almost no on-street parking in the area, but there is parking in the building (specifically, the "A" level of the John Hastings Tower at 515 S. Flower St.) and getting parking validated at Weiland's Brewery Underground reduces parking to just $3.

The parking entrance is a very quick right turn heading underground, immediately after 5th St.

About LA Drupal

LA Drupal is one of the world's largest regional Drupal user groups and is Southern California's largest hub for all things Drupal. In addition to being home to 4 regularly scheduled meetups a month and occasional trainings and social gatherings, LA Drupal is the producer of the annual DrupalCamp LA and Drupal Design Camp LA conferences.

Attending LA Drupal events is one of the best ways to meet and talk with other Drupaleros and we encourage you to attend meetings and special events regularly. Whether it's about finding solutions to problems you've been having, sharing something you've learned or just meeting interesting like-minded people, the LA Drupal events are an essential resource for Drupal professionals and hobbyists alike.

If you aren't already part of LA Drupal, it's easy to become a member and find events in our community calendar at http://groups.drupal.org/la/events