High Performance Drupal meetup at Filter Digital in Culver City on March 6, 2012

The High Performance Drupal meetup now meets on the 1st Tuesday of the month. We're meeting again on March 6, 2012 and will be at Filter Digital, a digital solutions agency in Culver City located just two blocks from Media Temple, a familiar venue of Drupal meetups on the Westside.

LA Drupal meetups follow a basic format and start off with Drupal news and announcements, local job announcements, raffle prizes and full-length presentations. As always, we'll also have community Q&A, during which time anyone in attendance can ask questions, divine answers from the crowd and give brief, 5-10 minute-long presentations known as lightning talks.

We'll finish off the night with more networking and a Drupal After Dark at 9:30pm.

For any changes to our agenda, stay tuned to this meetup announcement or click the Sign up button below (or both!) to be notified when the agenda has been updated.

About High Performance Drupal

What is the High Performance Drupal meetup about? The "high performance" part of the name is a catch-all to describe Drupal scalability, performance and benchmarking but we also discuss hosting, infrastructure, deployment, monitoring and highly repeatable processes. Also, this meetup has been held at coffeeshops in the past and the addition of caffeine makes our meetings feel as if they go faster and faster as the night goes on.

This is an LA Drupal meetup that focuses exclusively on advanced topics and there will not be a Users Helping Users portion to the evening.

Thank you to our sponsors!

Light food and refreshments will be served throughout the evening courtesy of our food, drink and venue sponsor, Filter Digital, a digital solutions agency.

Filter Digital's client list spans global brands and Fortune 100 companies to startups and boutique firms. Let us help you create a digital solution that fits your needs!

Our projector and screen for the evening is being provided by Exaltation of Larks, a Drupal strategy, consulting, development and training company with a team of Drupal experts in Los Angeles.

Exaltation of Larks likes to do hard things on the web and excels at creating and maintaining exceptional Drupal sites with unexceptional budgets.

Agenda

   6:30pm
   Drupal Design Camp LA 2012 planning meeting
   Projector and tables / chairs setup

   7:30pm
   Introductions and job announcements
   News and upcoming events (Drupal Design Camp LA 2012, DrupalCon Denver, LA Drupal Business Summit, etc.)
   Community questions and answers

   8:30pm
   Presentation: Getting Crafty in the Kitchen with Chef
   Lightning Talk: Installing Drush with One Command
   Raffle prizes!

   9:30pm
   Wrap-up, Clean-up and Close-up
   Drupal After Dark and networking session

Join us on Twitter, Google+ and IRC!

During the meetup, several of us will be in the #drupal-la channel on IRC and the LA Drupal hangout on Google+ and all are welcome to join us. The event organizers will also be monitoring Twitter for feedback and questions that mention @ladrupal or use the #ladrupal hashtag.

Drupal Design Camp LA 2012 planning meeting

The meetup begins at 7:30pm but the doors open a little earlier at 6:30pm for a Drupal Design Camp LA 2012 planning meeting. Stop by, hear how the conference was last year and join the conference organizing team! We'll be discussing venues, insurance matters, the first-ever LA Drupal business summit and other conference activities.

Presentations and Lightning Talks

The evening will have a mixture of full-length presentations and brief lightning talks, which are brief, 5-10 minute presentations, demos or discussions that anyone can give. It can be about a new website you're working on, a Drupal module you've written or come across recently that you'd like to talk about, or just a burning question you'd like to ask of the crowd.

Presentation: Getting Crafty in the Kitchen with Chef

Craig McEldowney (@craigmceldowney) and Steve Rifkin (@steverifkin) of Exaltation of Larks (@LarksLA) have been using Chef and Knife to construct their sever deployment in a repeatable format that keeps track of the architecture and can make changes on the fly. This presentation will include a quick 30-minute demo on how to setup chef on Mac OS X, use the opscode managed hosting to test, and deploy some servers!

Time permitting, we will show several different examples of how you can change recipes, use run lists, as well as define server roles to better abstract your own architecture to make a fully-repeatable and -versionable run-time process of your own!

Lightning Talk: Installing Drush with One Command

Christefano Reyes (@christefano) of Exaltation of Larks (@LarksLA) will give a short talk and demo on installing Drush, the command line tool for Drupal that's a complete replacement for Drupal's drupal.sh script.

The installation uses a simple one-liner that gets runs on every server that that Exaltation of Larks provisions and configures, so this lightning talk will be 3-4 minutes in length. Don't blink or you might miss it!

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

Our raffle prizes often include discount codes, magazines, DVDs and books. We are always grateful to our sponsors for their continued support. If you have any items you'd like to donate to the raffle, please contact any of the organizers at the meetup.

We'll be raffling the following items at this meetup:

• Invitation codes to Pantheon
  Pantheon is a Drupal hosting and development platform with the usual stack of Drupal, Apache, MySQL and PHP, but comes with extra high-performance goodness like Pressflow, Memcache, Varnish and Solr. If that weren't enough, Pantheon accounts have a complete environment where code and databases can be moved up and down from dev, test and production.

  Sound complicated? It actually isn't, because all this functionality is managed with an easy to use point-and-click interface.

Location and directions

   Filter Digital
   5782 W. Jefferson Blvd.
   Los Angeles, CA 90016

Filter is located next to Corbis, on West Jefferson Street and is the brick building running along side of the large concrete building. When parking, please choose from one of the many unmarked spaces in the lot.

There is construction of a new metro stop across the street, so please plan to arrive a few minutes early.

FROM THE NORTH:

Head South on S. La Cienega Blvd. (Note, this is what Fairfax eventually turns into). Continue on S. La Cienega until you reach the intersection of S. La Cienega and Jefferson Blvd. Quickly after that you will see the See's Candy store on your right. Turn right (on Corbett) as if turning into their parking lot. Continue down that lane all the way to the end. You will see a sign that says 5788 on the left. There take a right into our parking lot and park anywhere. To find our office, just take a right at the cafe tables.

FROM THE SOUTH:

Head North on S. La Cienega Blvd. Continue North on S. La Cienega through the intersection of S. La Cienega and Rodeo Rd. You will see Target on your left and The Chinese Laundry shoe outlet. Quickly after The Chinese Laundry turn left (on Corbett) as if turning into the See's Candy store. Continue down that lane all the way to the end. You will see a sign that says 5788 on the left. There take a right into our parking lot and park anywhere. To find our office, just take a right at the cafe tables.

FROM THE EAST:

Head West on W. Jefferson Blvd. Continue on S. La Cienega until you reach the intersection of S. La Cienega and Jefferson Blvd. There, take a left to head South on S. La Cienega Blvd. Quickly after that you will see the See's Candy store on your right. Turn right (on Corbett) as if turning into their parking lot. Continue down that lane all the way to the end. You will see a sign that says 5788 on the left. There take a right into our parking lot and park anywhere. To find our office, just take a right at the cafe tables.

FROM THE WEST:

Head East on National Blvd. When you reach the intersection of National Blvd and Jefferson, continue going straight into our parking lot (You'll notice a metal marquee with both "Possible Worldwide" and "Filter" listed). Park anywhere, then head to the building with the jagged roof and take a right. To find our office, just take a right at the cafe tables.

Drupal After Dark

Even if you can't make it to the meetup, you're welcome to join us for a Drupal After Dark. After we wrap up the meeting and clean up, a group of us will go to a nearby restaurant or pub.

What to bring

Just bring your laptop, your business cards or whatever else you need. You're also welcome to bring some light food, sodas or beers to share with others at the meetup.

About Filter Digital

Filter provides creative marketing solutions and staffing resources. Our services are distinguished by outstanding quality, talented people and exceptional value.

We are both more agile and more cost-effective than traditional agencies because of our unique approach to resourcing and staffing our engagements. Let us help you create a digital solution that fits your needs. Our client list spans global brands and Fortune 100 companies to startups and boutique firms.

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 scheduling up to 7 regular meetups a month and occasional trainings and social gatherings, LA Drupal members produce special events, code sprints, and 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 to find 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