Pat's Tavern & Grill
70 S. BROWN STREET, RHINELANDER, WI
(715) 362-3171
I am reaching out to web development agencies in the Rhinelander/Northwoods area to see if anyone is interested in a meetup. I will be visiting the area over the next few weeks, and this is something I enjoy doing back at home in the Washington D.C. area. If you aren't familiar with tech meetups, it's just an opportunity for professionals to network, show off their accomplishments, and learn from each other. People tend to organize them on sites like meetup.com.
A little about myself. My name is John Brandenburg, I am a web developer, working primarily on Drupal projects at a services agency called Forum One in the Washington D.C. area (my profile https://www.forumone.com/team/john-brandenburg/ --worst pic of me ever). Mainly focused on non-profits and government sites. I tech lead several projects in a support capacity (ongoing work of existing sites rather than building new sites). My mother-in-law has a house in Rhinelander that she spends the summer in, so we visit the town every year for a few weeks. And I am interested in engaging more with the Rhinelander community.
I was thinking maybe Tuesday, August 20th, at Pat's Tavern, starting at 7:00pm. I reached out to Pats to confirm that we can use their space, and they are all set for us. If you are interested, please stop by (and let me know if you plan to), and if you are interested in providing any quick talks on a topic you think will be interesting, please let me know. If this ends up being successful, maybe it could become a semi-regular thing. I am inviting teams from the Rhinelander and surrounding areas . But if you know anyone else who would be interested, please feel free to invite them.
PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF YOU PLAN TO ATTEND SO WE CAN GET A ROUGH ESTIMATE OF GROUP SIZE!
Lastly, do you have any thoughts on what people might be interested in? Just from looking at some of the local web dev shops in the area, I see people mostly doing wordpress (as a Drupal guy, I can't talk a whole lot about wordpress). Here are a few ideas:
- DevOps: Continuous Integration/Deployment
- Composer (The PHP package manager)
- Configuration Management Tools: WP-CFM
- Managing local environments
- Git workflows
- Debugging
- Hosting platforms (I can talk about Pantheon or Acquia)
- Design/theming
- Front-end frameworks
- Contributing to open source projects
I can try to prepare a presentation (being more of a back-end dev, I probably won't be well equipped to talk about front-end subjects, though I can talk about component based theming with pattern lab and twig in Drupal). This probably isn't the best time for me to talk about some of the dev tools I use regularly, we are undergoing a re-architecture of our stack, so the things I'm familiar with are on the way out, and I'm not quite familiar with things that are on the way in...