Hello Everyone,
I really didn't think it would get even better so soon. Last week ended in two amazing meet-ups in Pretoria, Gauteng:
Pretoria, Centurion Drupal User Group Meet-up
Thursday evening was the first of the two. Thank you so much for all the effort that was put in by the organisers and speakers. This meet-up seriously reminded me of why I started attending meet-ups regularly in the first place. To learn! Renate and the team at Yonder Media hosted with more than enough catering to last through the very long and interesting night (there was left overs in the end).
First up was MikeD with a talk on Twig, the Drupal 8 theming layer. The talk didn't just give us all a great basic understanding of it, but also highlighted the value of Drupal having moved from a "not invented here" approach to a "proudly invented elsewhere" one. MikeD and the team are moving over a massive company from Joomla! to Drupal, so they are often new to many things Drupal but have decades of experience in large scale PHP work. Transitioning from such a background to Drupal 8 will be so much easier and one can rely on much more of one's previous experience (really, they forked Joomla! with extensive changes to meet their needs, so it's nothing like plain old Joomla!).
Lee was next; Completely remaking his Varnish talk into a really well fleshed-out and detailed one with many examples, even live logs and impressive statistics drawn from one of the most popular sites our community has insights into. The segue from his talk into unconferencing was smooth, with many of the people there raising topics that tied back into good caching.
That would have been enough to make any geek happy. Technical, enriching, amazing! But there was more to follow, the best to come. Unconferencing was next, well rounded and very diverse. About everyone there went off on a tangent with skills and ideas raised that was often very new and exciting to hear about. The longest wireless link in SA, containerising Drupal (and I don't mean light-weight Docker stuff), development work-flows, make files, it just went on and on, possibly better than any Drupal unconference I've attended. I made loads of notes for further research - thank you especially to Jonathan for the follow-up e-mails and supporting material.
Several times my Libre and oh so very open source and freedoms loving heart sang as people expressed love and support for the topic. This is a seriously freedom loving group. The GPL rocks!
Thank you all for this beautiful night. Amazing attendance too.
Pretoria, Arcadia Drupal Government and NGO Meeting
Friday it was back off to Pretoria with the Uber car laden with drink and snacks. Little did I know most Government departments don't drink during office hours - man did I go ill prepared in terms of soft drinks. We'll fix that next time. This was a day-time meet, so mid-day to 3pm.
Our hosts, as before, was the Department of Arts and Culture and specifically, Seaparo Phala and the team there. The last time we were there felt a little speechy. So this time we planned no speakers and only unconferencing. That helped a heck of a lot with the second Johannesburg, Parkhurst meet-up last year, and it sure worked here too.
The thing with unconferencing is that it creates networks and helps people know who to ask, gives them all voice and really just gives everyone an opportunity to become better known so that we can all then talk to each other easier. I personally like the evenness of it all too.
To start with, things were still a little separated. The departments and their contingents seemed to talk mostly with people they work with and know. This was still pre meet-up hallway track stuff though. Over the course of introductions and unconferencing things relaxed more. We hit 3pm too quickly and many people had to leave, but the intimacy of the few that remained then became even more open and easy in terms of discussion.
To me some of the most valuable insights came from the SITA and GCIS guys. I learned a lot from them that day as I've got very little idea of the challenges faced by government departments. There are many more opportunities than challenges though and the requirements mentioned and discussions of how they can be met were awesome.
Once again freedom and independence featured, but for me the highlight and most valuable part of the day was to see how hard these guys work with our tax money to build websites that are meant to serve us as the public. They talk constantly about better systems and data services for us all. It's a constant motivation for anything planned and done there. The use of free(dom) software comes naturally and is then motivated by all. Our privacy is their concern and items I feel strongly about, like hosting our sites in our country so that our citizens' data (including browsing habits) are kept here, under our laws that protect us, came up too.
Again, thank you very much to all who attended. I wish this one happened more than twice a year.
Freedom, Privacy, Transparency. I love this job ;-)
Now, my Ansible scripts are nearly done for the day, which then means manual work. Really need to figure out how to automate absolutely everything ;-)
Kind regards,
Riaan
PS: Great to have all the Capetonians at both events!