Drupal Cape Town February Meetup

Thank you everyone for the Cape Town meet-up!

For those who didn't make it this time:

I came down for three days, starting with the Cape Town meet-up. The plan was to visit Rogerwilco for some work related items and the following days was devoted to that, but on Wednesday evening Rogerwilco was also the host venue for the Drupal user group meet-up. Johan and I met earlier in the day and with the venue being a bit far out from Cape Town, we decided to leave for the area early. We were discussing some DASA affairs at a coffee shop when Charlie phoned to hear if we wanted to come through early. It was only a short walk from the mall to their offices, the old Mark Shattleworth place where they worked on Ubuntu with great open gardens, a pool and the old source code for an open source project like Ubuntu apparently locked in a safe somewhere (no idea why) ;-)

Hints were all around that this was not to be a regular meet-up (hot-dog rolls, copious amounts of drink (it would appear this is usual for Rogerwilco) and a braai prepared downstairs). Still, who knew how many people would drive that far in traffic on a week day. Some other people had the same idea to come through earlier and from here on in, nice and early already, people arrived constantly and slowly enough for everyone to be able to say hello to each other. I really like that, because usually this part happened so quickly one barely gets a chance to talk. Even so, I somehow missed Jason, also rather a social butterfly and quite busy at these events, for a decent chat.

We started slightly late for Cape Town; More on time for a Johannesburg meet-up. Jason Lewis, Cape Town's perpetually up-beat host and organiser, opened for us, introducing everyone and while the attendance was too high to do a full introductions round as usual at meet-ups, the time we had before seemed to make up for that to some extent (I'd still have liked a round to get to know everyone just a little bit better).

First up was Bryan Gruneberg of DevSpot.io and Daddy's Deals who dived into an interesting recent development of theirs for Daddy's Deals. Essentially, for new products they, as a development team had to supply their client support team with information from the system. They started with drush commands to extract essential information, but that still required their intervention (and good developers are lazy, so automate things). Since they configured a Slack channel (maybe in future Mattermost, because we're all open source guys right ;-) they then decided to link their drush extraction scripts with the channel. Running on AWS they created a Slack bot to answer questions right there and live in the Slack channel. It would draw the info from the drush scripts. I can't remember a question exactly, but say: What was the total of the last order by Riaan Burger. Things like that, I'd assume. Pretty awesome and techy-interesting, just the novel kind of thing we all prefer to work on rather than the next brochure ware site! Thank you very much for sharing Bryan!

Next up was Charlie Stewart, CEO of Rogerwilco. At first the slides laptop refused to show the slides. probably to do with it being a Mac in the old Ubuntu offices. This was an amazing talk that touched on much of the nature of Drupal in the South African market, contrasted with the international market. Charlie highlighted the differences for us and set out some ideas of how we can address Drupal in our local market to grow it to the benefit of all. I'm always weary of company-related events, but he was all about a rising tide for all, from individuals to better cooperation between companies. Thank you Charlie also for the call for membership of DASA. If any of you want to receive an invoice for membership (individual is R 150 p.a. and organisation R 5 000 p.a.) contact me or e-mail info@dasa.org.za to reach our secretary. With hard work and some decent marketing, we will shed being an option to Wordpress and Joomla! locally and realign to being the better option to Adobe Expression Engine and Sitecore. Drupal does enterprise! That will take a huge effort by our community; We all need to learn to lint, write tests, use continuous integration and write some great standards compliant code, and fast! But that is just the supply-side, on the marketing and positioning that Charlie focussed on we have even more work and it's the kind of stuff we as programmers have less experience in and where we can certainly use some assistance from the many new strong organisations forming, especially in Cape town. How awesome will it be to see tender terms of reference specify Drupal and decent development work-flow with budgets to support that!

The evening had a very extended end. With so much drink and very interesting talks, there was no time for unconferencing, people needed to stretch their legs and we proceeded mostly downstairs and to the gardens to enjoy a braai and socialise. Though I love unconferencing for the dense learning experience, my favourite time of a meet-up is the hallway track, so I was very, very happy with the social time afterwards and enjoyed speaking to all the Capetonians - way too many to simply list all of you ;-)

Considering the success of the meet-up, I'm wondering if we shouldn't learn from it and cycle the Johannesburg meet-ups between hosts. Maybe even the Gauteng ones, just one a month, but hosted by any entity interested and prepared to put out because it's a unique event on their calendar. That will certainly make for more serious events and a real loss if you miss one. Of course, they are organised by many people right now, so we'll have to discuss and see how everyone feels about it. At the moment the biggest thing I miss from meet-ups is the tech. We used to have incredibly rich events in terms of learning so many things that I used to have to carry a notebook with me. It's also usually not the talks, but the unconferencing that leads to that technology rich nature of an event. That can come again later, but for now, this was one of the best meet-ups I've attended.

Thank you once again, everyone, for such a great and worth-while time!