April Talk Night @ Sift Towers

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rsaddington's picture
Start: 
2014-04-02 18:00 - 21:00 Europe/London
Event type: 
User group meeting

Hey All,

We've got a few talks lined up for our first meetup in April. The format will be a little longer than our lightning talks session last year, thinking around 15-30 mins each with time for Q+A.

The Talks

So far we have the following subjects put forward

Drush for Beginners
Tom Metcalfe

Drupal 8 module conversion, walk-through and resources
Chris Hall

Vlad: Vagrant LAMP Ansible Drupal
Dan Bohea

Popular Performance Pitfalls
Drew Webber

Building responsive, swappable templates with Bootstrap
Piers Shephard

(Thanks guys - feel free to suggest proper titles when you have them)

If anyone else has a subject they are willing to do a short talk on, please suggest it - if you're thinking of talking for the first time it's a great opportunity.

Other deets

We'll have a projector setup and our biggest meeting room which can accommodate around 30-40 people.

We'll order some food in (most likely pizza) for mid-way and do a chip-in to fund it - Microserve will be sponsoring the food.

We'll kick off shortly after 6 to allow travel time for most who finish work at 5.30 and aim to wrap up before 9 - depending on how many talks we have.

As always, please use the signup if you're planning to attend as we need to provide names to the security chap downstairs.

All details to get to Sift Towers can be found here:
http://www.siftdigital.co.uk/contact

Cheers

Rich

Comments

Looking forward to it

chris_hall_hu_cheng's picture

Looking forward to it, the last one was really good.

Working title for my talk is:
"Drupal 8 module conversion, walk-through and resources"

What just happened? :)

dddbbb's picture

Looks like I'm doing a session on Vlad then. lol

Awesome

rsaddington's picture

Thanks Chris and Dan

Dan - I've said 'put forward' rather than 'committed' :)

I'd be keen to hear more about Vlad the Deployer....

Right you are

dddbbb's picture

Right you are - sorry, must've missed that bit. Still happy to do it though.

Working title

dddbbb's picture

Ok, working title for Vlad session as follows: "Vlad: Vagrant LAMP Ansible Drupal"

Catchy, no?

Count me in ...

iAugur's picture

If Dan is presenting on Vlad ...

+1 for Vlad! All hail Vlad

blacklabel_tom's picture

+1 for Vlad! All hail Vlad the deployer!

Vlad the Provisioner

dddbbb's picture

Technically I think it would be "Vlad the Provisioner". Not quite as catchy but I know he's an obsessive stickler for details.

Any other takers for talks?

blacklabel_tom's picture

Any other takers for talks? I'm looking at you Nick Potter, Nick Aspinall and Tom Lopez!

Next time I promise

T-lo's picture

Next time I promise

I'll be there

markpavlitski's picture

I'll be there, and I'll round up a few other Microserve'rs too.

Also, we'd be happy to sponsor the food/pizzas - let me know the attendee numbers a bit closer to the time.

@rsaddington/Sift thanks for hosting!

Thanks Mark, that would be

rsaddington's picture

Thanks Mark, that would be awesome.

We have 13 signups so far but with a week or so to go that's sure to go up quite a bit.

Twitter

chris_hall_hu_cheng's picture

I will promote a bit more via twitter tomorrow, might up things a bit 13 signups at this stage looks promising though :)

Il come. May even talk

PiersShepherd's picture

Il be there. Cant really say no as I work in the building. If I can think of something interesting to talk about I can share if you want.

We've defo got time for a few

rsaddington's picture

We've defo got time for a few more talks so if you have something you've worked on recently you could share that would be ace, would also be good to have a FE focussed talk too.

I can talk about...

PiersShepherd's picture

Ok, if you like I can talk about how we (PracticeWEB) have used our custom Bootstrap theme to build a set of responsive themes with a custom admin display that clients can use to completely customise the website. Its pretty cool.

Awesome, I'd really like to

n_potter's picture

Awesome, I'd really like to hear about this

Cool, I'd be keen to the

rsaddington's picture

Cool, I'd be keen to see the latest on this too - do you have a working title?

Maybe...

PiersShepherd's picture

"Building responsive, swappable templates with Bootstrap"

I'd like to come along - I'd

mcdruid's picture

I'd like to come along - I'd be happy to talk about "Popular Performance Pitfalls" if that would be of interest?

Liking the sound of this.

dddbbb's picture

Liking the sound of this.

Hey Drew, that would

rsaddington's picture

Hey Drew, that would definitely be of interest, I'll add to you the line up.

Thanks for putting a talk forward and nice alliteration :)

See ya there

nicrodgers's picture

:-)

I would guess we have enough talks now

chris_hall_hu_cheng's picture

Mine will probably be on the longer side (towards 30 mins).

Looking forward to the evening ...

Ooh I wanna come.

dildeeplehal's picture

Depending on if i can get there in time, i'd like to come to this one. - Dil

Live streaming

PiersShepherd's picture

Hello everyone

Unless people disagree, we will be live streaming the meetup using Google Hangouts.

This would be great as

  • it allows others who cannot make it to watch along,
  • people can watch the video back afterwards on youtube,
  • it shows that we have a strong and developer community in Bristol with some very smart developers.

Piers

That'd be fantastic. I'd like

Leo Pitt's picture

That'd be fantastic. I'd like to listen but am unlikely to be able to make it in person.

Not for me thanks

dddbbb's picture

I appreciate the heads up :) but for several reasons I'm not down with this.

I'm happy to pull out if this is a must-have.

Coming round to the idea

dddbbb's picture

The more I think it over, the more I'm coming to terms with the idea of this and slowly convincing myself to just deal with it. I don't want to be a party pooper :)

That said, in future, I think it would be very smart to state up front, before any sessions are submitted, whether or not the meetup will be recorded or streamed and what will happen to any recordings after.

Happy with the idea but....

chris_hall_hu_cheng's picture

Some of the reservations Dan felt are probably similar to mine. There are many audiences and recording adds another big dimension. Talks prepared for Drupalcons and big camps often stand well on their own, slides are well prepared and the talker has taken into account the potential global audience.

A more local talk may only work well if you are there, cultural references, shared experiences etc. alongside slides that are really just for occasional references etc.

There are lot of slide shows on slideshare and talks from local groups that are not worth watching (but may have been excellent if you were actually there).

I am happy if there is some kind of intro and explanation that put things in context.

Also if we can mention the twitter account https://twitter.com/drupalbristol ;)

Maybe next time

PiersShepherd's picture

Hi everyone

Thanks for the feedback. We will leave the live streaming this time. You gave some great points to think about.

However, I would love to get this going at an event in the future.

Anyways, see you on wednesday.

I think it would be great to

blacklabel_tom's picture

I think it would be great to start live streaming as standard at some point, it will give people a chance to attend who can't physically get here.

We could possibly do a hangout at some point with the Drupal Somerset lot if everyone up for it?

Beer sponsor

rsaddington's picture

To add to the Pizza that Microserve will be providing, Sift Digital will be able to provide some beer.

If you were thinking of signing up but needed a little more persuasion hopefully this will be it :)

Looking forward to Weds....

Excellent, looking forward to

markpavlitski's picture

Excellent, looking forward to it even more now!

We'll bring some coke & diet coke too, for the non-drinkers.

i will be there!

annao's picture

Looking forward to it...

I know it's a bit late!

chrisjarvis1's picture

I know it's a bit late but was hoping to come to this one if you can squeeze me in.

Cheers

If it isn't too late...

Bhagesh Sachania's picture

I've just signed up.
It's been a while so I'm looking forward to catching-up with everyone.

Cheers

And later still!

kiwimind's picture

I've just signed up too... Hope that there's going to be room.

Thanks.

Thanks all for the talks

n_potter's picture

Thanks all for the talks everyone, some great stuff to take away!

Drew, I was particularly interested in your bst drush extension, is that available for use at this point?

Yeah I enjoyed it - thanks to

mcdruid's picture

Yeah I enjoyed it - thanks to all involved and especially Rich for organising. Sorry I had to run off before the end to catch the last train home...

@Tom: I did't know about the drush dl --select option; I've been doing two steps with drush rl and then dl, so that's going to be really handy, thanks!

@Chris: really interesting stuff on D8, and some good thoughts about how to approach the transition mentally as well as practically (I think I subscribe to GOM over blind unquestioning optimism, but share a lot of your positive views on what's coming in D8).

@Dan: vlad (and ansible) look interesting - (as a linux user) I'm looking at LXC containers as a very lightweight alternative to full-blown VMs. I believe there's a vagrant-lxc project, and there are ways of getting lxc containers to run on OSX but I'm not sure how mature either of those are. It would be interesting to look at how vagrant-lxc might work with the rest of vlad... looking into that has definitely been added to my (rather long) todo list.

@Piers: I'm really sorry I missed pretty much your entire talk as I had to run to get the last train home - partly my fault for running over. Sounded like it was going to be interesting.

@n_potter: I'm hoping to get Bootstrap Smoke Test (bst) into Drush Debug Tools:

https://drupal.org/node/2226905

...but in the meantime you can get a copy from github:

https://github.com/mcdruid/mcdruid-drush

You could clone that repo (or a fork thereof) into ~/.drush (you may have to run drush cc drush to get drush to pick it up), or you can stick it somewhere else and use drush --include=/path/to/dir

I'm thinking about extending bst so that it's able to test some other things like perhaps hook_boot - feedback / ideas / patches welcome... on github or in the Drush Debug Tools issue.

Thanks all

rsaddington's picture

Thanks for coming everyone, and a big thanks to Tom, Dan, Chris, Drew and Piers for an excellent selection of talks.

The slides are all accessible here:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1J2gs8nrBHWqAsIgGCJPd8H511uj62_m5...

We'd like to follow up this meetup with some feedback on how we should run future sessions like this and topics people would be interested to hear more about. Would also be good to explore live streaming and whether it's something we could introduce at future meetups.

Keep an eye out for new post in the next few days...

NCP wallet destruction

dddbbb's picture

Before I forget, and I probably will before said follow up post, can we go back to making the start time slightly later (1830)? The NCP car park does a fixed night time rate of £2.50 between 1800-0000. Yesterday I parked up at 1750 and got back from the pub to a >£15 parking ticket. Bum holes.