Droplabs

Join us on Friday, May 4, 2012 from 7-to-wheneven for our Birthday Month Kickoff Extravaganza and Drupal After Dark at Droplabs, your FREE Drupal coworking and hackerspace in Downtown Los Angeles.

In just 1 year, we've had nearly 100 events, including dozens of Drupal meetups and workshops, countless FREE tutoring sessions from Drupal professionals and several barn raisings to benefit non-profits and members of our community here in and around Los Angeles.

Celebrating our Birthday Month Kickoff Extravaganza is a great way to show your support and cheer us on for another year of coworking, networking and collaboration. Join us!

What to bring

Bring warm clothing and some light food, sodas or beers to share with others. Be a hero and bring good stuff to throw on the grill. Feel free to bring your business cards, but this is a social occasion and you can leave your laptop at home, in the car or in your locker at Droplabs.

Global Accessibility Awareness Day is a community-driven effort whose goal is to focus one day to raise the profile of digital (web, software, mobile app/device, touch screen kiosk, etc.) accessibility and people with different disabilities.

The idea started with a single blog post. On May 9th, people in communities around the world are encouraged to hold a talk/meetup, organize hands-on demos, or plan another activity that brings attention to some aspect of digital accessibility. Follow @GblA11yDay on Twitter and use the #gaad hashtag in your own tweets.

Droplabs is happy to participate in this global event. We will have both Dallas Legan and Larry Hart on-hand to present:

• Dallas Legan is a well-respected member of the Southern California Open Source ecosystem. He has presented on a variety of topics at UUASC, LAMP-SIG, the San Fernando Valley Linux Users Group, the San Gabriel Valley Linux Users Group and SCALE.
• Larry Hart is a longtime member of the San Fernando Valley Linux Users Group. He also happens to be a blind web user and will be imparting both his knowledge and frustrations of using a non-accessible web. We hope this will lead to discussions on how we, as web developers, can create a more usable and accessible web.

The next Downtown LA Drupal meetup is on Tuesday, April 17, 2012 and will be at Droplabs, a Drupal event and coworking space in Downtown Los Angeles. At this meetup, we'll be featuring two presentations: Introduction to VPS Hosting and Managing Servers with Virtualmin, Featurize! and Business Model Generation for Drupalpreneurs.

Light food and refreshments will be served throughout the evening courtesy of our food and drink sponsor, Chernick Consulting. We are a full IT outsourcing organization that can help you make your computers do anything you want it to (except cook or do laundry). We have a great deal of experience following corporate policies and procedures and will gladly supply IT services for larger organizations with branch offices in Los Angeles.

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

Join us at Droplabs on Friday & Saturday, April 27-28, 2012, for a Barn Raising and Code Sprint to benefit the Echo Park Time Bank and TimeBanks USA!

There's something for everyone at this two-day event and you're welcome to attend either or both days. If you're interested in learning more about the Features module and getting some practical hands-on experience, or if you're a Features power user and would like to help mentor others into using Drupal's best practices for site development, this is an excellent opportunity.

The Echo Park Time Bank is a non-profit community collective with a mission to facilitate the cooperative exchange of goods and services among its hundreds of members. Since September 2011, the Echo Park Time Bank has been using Drupal to manage their community website at http://arroyoseco.timebanks.org and its currency system.

We'll be using the Features module and configuration-in-code methodology to help make feature development, maintenance and updates to their site much easier. The Features that we create will be shared with TimeBanks USA, which will directly benefit the 300+ time banks that have their own sites that use the same Drupal distribution.

Join us for a VPS and Virtualmin Installfest at Droplabs on Saturday, April 21, 2012. We're going to discuss VPS (virtual private server) hosting, when and why you should be using it, and we'll have a brief presentation on Virtualmin, a free, open-source control panel.

The second part of the workshop is a hands-on installfest. We'll be getting as many people up and running with their own VPS servers, and optionally install Virtualmin for those who want it.

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

Agenda

   10:00am
   Projector and tables / chairs setup

   10:30am
   Introductions
   Presentation: Smart VPS Management for Smart People, by Christefano Reyes
   Questions and answers

   12:00pm
   Lunch! This is potluck-style, so please bring something for yourself and another

   12:30pm
   Hands-on VPS and Virtualmin Installfest

   2:30pm
   Wrap-up, clean-up and close-up

A Note About VPS Hosting

Please note that running ones own server isn't for the faint of heart. If you're happy with shared hosting or have limited time and resources, then this workshop is probably not for you.

This workshop is intended for people who want to further their knowledge and are ready for — or already have — VPS or dedicated hosting and all the power and performance options that come with that.

Join some passionate Drupalers at Droplabs near Downtown L.A. for a work session as we work on our respective projects. While it does not have to be your own startup project that you are working on necessarily, the project should be one in which you're passionate enough to need the support of your fellow Drupalers to motivate you to the end.

Normally our meetings have been more conversational, yet this will be a true "barn-raising" work session where we help each other with Drupal get our projects up and running.

When: Saturday, April 28, 2012 @ Starting at 12pm to about 3 PM.

This group discusses the subject matter of book, points out the errors in the book and discusses the differences between Drupal 6 and Drupal 7. There is no preparation for this week's group, but be prepared to read at least 2 chapters of the book for the following week.

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.

Please note that our guest wireless network is limited to 1Mb per client, so bring your MiFi router or a phone you can tether with if for some reason you need a lot of bandwidth. Access to our high-speed network is included with a Droplabs membership.

Tonight we will discuss Chapters 1,2 and 3 as we discussed last week.
This group discusses the subject matter of book, points out the errors in the book and discusses the differences between Drupal 6 and Drupal 7. There is no preparation for this week's group, but be prepared to read at least 2 chapters of the book for the following week.

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.

Please note that our guest wireless network is limited to 1Mb per client, so bring your MiFi router or a phone you can tether with if for some reason you need a lot of bandwidth. Access to our high-speed network is included with a Droplabs membership.

The High Performance Drupal meetup is meeting again on the 1st Tuesday of the month. Please join us at Droplabs, a Drupal event and coworking space in Downtown Los Angeles, on May 1, 2012.

Our meetups follow a basic format and start off with Drupal news and announcements, local job announcements, breakout sessions, 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.

The projector and raffle prizes for this event are being provided by Exaltation of Larks, a Drupal strategy, consulting, development and training company with a team of Drupal experts in Los Angeles.

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