High Performance Drupal Meetup at Droplabs on October 2, 2012: Vagrant, SPDY and Google Ad Manager

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
christefano's picture
Start: 
2012-10-02 18:00 - 21:00 America/Los_Angeles
Event type: 
User group meeting

The next High Performance Drupal meetup is on Tuesday, October 2, 2012 and will be at Droplabs, your FREE Drupal event and coworking space in Downtown Los Angeles. Are you interested in attending this meetup but can't make it in person? You're welcome to attend remotely to via WebEx.

At this meetup, we'll learn about Vagrant, an open source tool that's used for creating and configuring virtual development environments. We'll also have an update on SPDY, the featured topic from last month's meetup. Finally, we'll hear about performance issues (and solutions) related to Google Ad Manager.

Thank You to Our Sponsors!

Exaltation of Larks - Expert Drupal strategy, consulting, development and training The projector, raffle prizes and video conferencing support 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. We create fun websites, mobile apps, virtual worlds and e-commerce sites. Follow us at @LarksLA to learn more about our Drupal services and upcoming trainings.

Droplabs Los Angeles This event is hosted by Droplabs, a collaborative Drupal event and coworking space in Downtown Los Angeles. We're quickly gaining a reputation for being the only free coworking space around with a freemium business model: come work here for free and only pay for the extras, such as 24/7 access, equipment rental and a locker for your belongings.

Agenda

Our meetups follow a basic format and start off with Drupal news and announcements, local job announcements, 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 9:00pm.

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.

   6:00pm
   Coworking, Networking and Users Helping Users
   Projector and Tables / Chairs Setup

   6:55pm
   Start of WebEx Meeting

   7:00pm
   News and Upcoming Events, including:
     • Accessibility Camp LA
     • Drupal Design Camp LA
     • Drupal Travelers Program
     • Drupal Coworking Friday
   Breakout Sessions

   8:00pm
   Raffle Prizes!
   Featured Presentations
   Lightning Talks

   9:00pm
   Wrap-up, Clean-up and Close-up
   Drupal After Dark and more networking

Join us on WebEx and Twitter!

The featured presentations at this meetup will be broadcasted via WebEx, courtesy of Exaltation of Larks. WebEx works in your browser, whether you use Linux, Windows or Mac OS X.

To join the meeting, click the Sign up button below to receive the meeting URL and password (a Drupal.org account is required).

During the meetup, several of the organizers will be monitoring Twitter for feedback and questions that mention @DowntownDrupal.

Users Helping Users

The meetup begins earlier than usual at 6:00pm for Users Helping Users, which is a chance for members of the community to help and be helped by others with whatever questions and problems they're having with Drupal.

Please note that while Users Helping Users is not designed to be a replacement for bona fide consulting from a Drupal professional that there are plenty of Drupal experts and professionals who attend our meetups and sometimes they need help, too!

Breakout Sessions

We have several spaces available for breakout sessions at 7:00pm. This is an opportunity for a open, multi-track format where we break into groups and discuss a variety of topics.

Each breakout session is led by a volunteer who picks the topic, picks the space and can optionally report back to the larger group in the form of an announcement or lightning talk.

To propose a breakout session, please arrive early and talk with one of the organizers or post a comment below.

Featured Presentations

At this meetup, we'll learn about Vagrant, an open source tool that's used for creating and configuring virtual development environments. We'll also have an update on SPDY, the featured topic from last month's meetup. Finally, we'll hear about performance issues (and solutions) related to Google Ad Manager.

Raffle prizes! Collect them all! Must be present to win!

Raffle prizes at this meetup have been provided by Exaltation of Larks. Our raffle prizes often include discount codes, magazines, DVDs and books. We are always grateful to our sponsors for their continued support.

If you have any items you'd like to donate to the raffle, please contact any of the organizers at the meetup. Thank you!

Drupal After Dark

Even if you can't make it to the meetup, you're welcome to join us for a Drupal After Dark. After we wrap up the meeting and clean up, a group of us will go to a nearby restaurant or pub. One time we had beers and a bonfire and were serenaded by Skrillex, who was rehearsing next door for the Mothership tour.

We've also gone to a variety of other locations, including Barbara's at The Brewery (at 620 Moulton Ave., just a 5 minute walk away) and Carnitas Michoacan (on 1901 N. Broadway, just a 5 minute drive away).

Google Map

Location and Directions

   Droplabs
   651 Clover St.
   Los Angeles, CA 90031

Droplabs is in the Mission Junction neighborhood of Los Angeles at Big Art Labs, just 1 mile down Main St. from Philippes (the first-ever venue for Los Angeles Drupal meetups!) and Union Station. We're one block west of The Brewery, the largest live-and-work artists' colony in the world.

Free parking in our large parking lot is first-come, first-served. After parking in the lot, follow the yellow signs that point to Droplabs. (If our lot is full, you can park for free on Clover St.)

Droplabs is a brief walk from the Main St. / Lamar St. stop on the the Metro Local 76 bus line. This is also the Lincoln Heights / Chinatown DASH stop.

To carpool or catch the Droplabs shuttle from Union Station, post below in the comments.

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.

Do you have a job announcement? Bring a copy of your job description and several business cards for our "take a card, leave a card" table.

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.

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.

We've been meeting regularly since April, 2011, in a variety of locations in and around Los Angeles, including Mar Vista, Santa Monica, Culver City and Downtown Los Angeles.

About Downtown Los Angeles Drupal

The Downtown Los Angeles Drupal group regularly meets in and around Downtown Los Angeles, California. We organize a large number of weekly and monthly events on various Drupal topics, including the general Downtown Los Angeles Drupal meetup that has been meeting regularly on the 3rd Tuesday of the month since early 2010.

The Downtown area is the most active area for Drupal in the Greater Los Angeles Area and has seen hundreds of Drupal events, including job fairs, meetups and workshops, study group meetings, conferences about design and theming, paid trainings, FREE tutoring sessions from Drupal professionals and barn raisings to benefit non-profits and members of our community here in and around Downtown Los Angeles.

Attending Drupal events in and around Downtown Los Angeles is one of the best ways to meet and talk with other Drupaleros and we encourage you to attend as many meetings and special events as you'd like. Whether it's to find solutions to problems you've been having, sharing something you've learned or just meeting interesting like-minded people, the Downtown Los Angeles Drupal events are an essential resource for Drupal professionals and hobbyists alike.

If you aren't already a member of Downtown Los Angeles Drupal, it's easy to join our community. Our community calendar is on our "Events" tab on our home page at http://groups.drupal.org/dtla

The Downtown Los Angeles Drupal group proudly participates in the California Drupal Travelers Program and can host businesses and community members who are visiting the area. Inquire within by contacting any of the Downtown Los Angeles Drupal organizers.

AttachmentSize
vagrant-121003105749-phpapp02.pdf2.22 MB
vagrant-121003105749-phpapp02.odp30.55 KB

Comments

Presentation ideas

christefano's picture

Here are a couple topics I've heard that people might be interested in talking about at this High Performance meetup:

  1. Bringing AJAX features in Views 3.x to sites with Views 2.x
  2. Use of tmpfs or ramfs for intensive file operations
  3. Modifications to Google AdManager to significantly improve site performance
  4. Updates on SPDY (our featured topic from the last High Performance meetup), Server Push, and the recent CRIME TLS / SSL exploit

If any of these sound interesting, post a comment below with a request and I'll nudge the folks who've expressed interest in presenting on that particular topic. Thanks!

Ad manager?

fejn's picture

I'd like to hear & discuss more about Google Ad Manager. There was a really powerful Ad Manager Drupal module in D6, but it seems like it was having some problems getting ported to D7.

It would be interesting to know what Google is offering that might help with some of the points Facebook recently made about 'clicks not being the most effective way to measure advertising efficiency'.

I can do a quick presentation on google_admanager module

oseldman's picture

I can give an update on where things are with this module (some new developments) and on some hacks I used to implement Google's asynchronous ad tags before the (D6) module supported them. Changing to asynchronous ads sped up the perceived page load time dramatically, by letting the content load first.

remotely

oseldman's picture

I should add that I wont be able to attend in person, so this short presentation would need to be done remotely over webex.

I've re-enabled the signups

christefano's picture

I've re-enabled the signups so that any stragglers can hit the Signup button below to receive our WebEx URL and password:

   http://groups.drupal.org/node/253493#signup

FYI, this URL and password are the same as the ones used for last month's High Performance Drupal meetup.

Password please

Tony-Mac's picture

webex Password please

manual

Tony-Mac's picture

Sory didn't rtfm

Vagrant?

craigmc's picture

Anybody interested in a chat about Vagrant? Probably just a lightning talk unless people have specific things they want to see done.

Los Angeles, CA

+1 from me

christefano's picture

Will your lightning talk cover how to control multiple VMs?

I'm also curious how Vagrant can be integrated in a repeatable build process for cloning production environments for use as development and staging environments.

I can roll some of that in.

craigmc's picture

I can roll some of that in. We'll see how fleshed out I can get the demo-- depends on some other stuff I've got going on before next week, but definitely am moving that direction in my development, and will share everything I've discovered.

Los Angeles, CA

Christo-- I'm thinking of

craigmc's picture

Christo-- I'm thinking of using this as a test presentation for the vagrant portion of my BADCamp presentation on chef/vagrant. Might run a little longer than 15 minutes, unless you need me to keep it short.

Los Angeles, CA

Sounds great! As far as I'm

christefano's picture

Sounds great! As far as I'm concerned, you can have as much time as you'd like. We'll see at the beginning of the meetup if anyone else wants to give a presentation and fit them into the rest of the time that's available.

Please edit teaser and reduce cross posts

mike stewart's picture

I request you reduce the length of the teaser. Also, cross posting to 14 groups seems excessive. Would it be acceptable if all the other LA meetups were always crossposted to 14 other groups?

A teaser is supposed to be a "tease." The LA Drupal homepage is laid out to take advantage of this fact. A post with a overriden default teaser length, such as you've done on this event, breaks the layout. Lengthining your teaser just to ensure your company advertising + logo is displayed everywhere feels to me its comes at the expense of community and doesn't feel right to me.

Or maybe I'm the oddball and the LA communty at large feels that every event should have comapny advertising on the homepage of our group?

--
mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }

The Downtown Los Angeles Drupal group

christefano's picture

The Downtown Los Angeles Drupal group produces between 5-10 events each month. You're welcome to sponsor any of them, including this month's High Performance Drupal meetup, in which case your company will also be prominently featured. As one of our community organizers, I'm tremendously grateful to the companies and organizations that make our events possible.

In return, our sponsors are grateful for the exposure they receive and the opportunity to provide value to the event and our communities. Sponsorship is an investment that can take the form of volunteer time, paid time, infrastructure costs, etc. and you're asking for the return on that investment to be reduced. That's an unusual request that I haven't heard before. Why are you asking now instead of 2 years ago when we started doing it?

Although I'm a community organizer, I'm closely associated with both of this month's meetup sponsors. This is apparent to anyone who sees my signature at the bottom of my posts. As a businessman, I recognize a professionally organized event when I see one and always hope to be involved if value is being provided to all involved.

Regarding cross-posting, this is exactly how Drupal Groups is designed to function. It would be helpful if you'd explicitly indicate which of the groups are inappropriate for this event announcement to be cross-posted in. If the layout of your user group page is an issue, I suggest fixing it. As far as I know the teaser length of the High Performance Drupal meetup announcements hasn't been a problem for any of the other groups.

Complaining and constantly editing other people's event announcements are not good examples of your understanding of community management or user generated content. It's been ages since you and I had a laugh together and every interaction with you these days are complaints about how or why things aren't the way you want them.

Interesting, I thought the

BTMash's picture

Interesting, I thought the request to trim down the teaser been asked a number of times. I definitely recall seeing a discussion on the issue a few times. It seems like when things like this happen, you can accept the request and try to make it shorter (it can be a fun challenge to get your point across in few words as possible) or make the situation bad for everyone and do what I had to end up doing for the scv group (title + date, end of discussion).

It reminds me of when stores like EB Games used to offer full refunds on games to people if they weren't fond of the game or there was something wrong within 30 days. Change to 15 days to 5 to same day to only sealed to 'we'll buy it back used for 1/5th of the price). Abuse of that system completely wrecked and ended the goodwill for everyone.

A request to trim down the

christefano's picture

A request to trim down the teaser was made just once, if I recall correctly:

   http://groups.drupal.org/node/217564#comment-714589

As you can see, that request was much more civil and everything worked out fine.

Don't make this personal. I

mike stewart's picture

Don't make this personal. I didn't. You were obviously aware of this issue , and you're skirting the issue. I apologize I didn't ask in a way you felt was civil. I do however feel what John asked in the past is important.

Can you please adjust the teaser to give describe the main meeting topic, and put the other details (e.g., sponsor credit) in the body?

--
mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }

I've already answered each

christefano's picture

I've already answered each point that's been brought up. May I suggest that if you have any remaining questions that you try finding a more appropriate forum to ask me?

Hopefully my previous responses are helpful — or at least entertaining — to anyone who works with community sponsors or other event organizers such as myself.

Thanks for the apology. I'm sorry you missed the meetup tonight.

I agree with Mike on both points.

apperceptions's picture

Way too much cross-posting makes it feel very spammy.

It would be helpful if you'd

christefano's picture

It would be helpful if you'd explicitly indicate which of the groups are inappropriate for this event announcement to be cross-posted in.

The only spam (or bacn, which I think is the proper term here) that I see being created by cross-posting is from all these off-topic posts in the comments.

Build a 'crap' filter

fejn's picture

While I'm sympathetic to the needs for the teaser & 'advertising' in the posts, I also see the point of these other protests: if posters can't 'self-censor' the amount of stuff that's put out with each message, I'm going to propose we switch our efforts at Droplabs to building a really good 'crap filter' for use all over the Net (mobile & other), because the problem we face nowadays is that there is so much 'noise' out there, it takes users real effort to sift through it all and find that "nugget in the haystack" (a.k.a. your message).

These event announcements are

christefano's picture

These event announcements are actually designed to be printed out and are packed with as much information as possible. Meanwhile, these event announcements are consistently structured in a way so that anyone can zero in on the part of the announcement that interests them.

What it really comes down to is that this event probably wouldn't be happening without sponsorship. Mike's request is that sponsorship details be downplayed, which is his choice for the events he's involved in. If more volunteers are interested in getting involved in making events like this one happen, then perhaps sponsorship at its current level wouldn't be needed as much.

I'm intrigued by your idea of a crap filter and am not entirely sure what you mean by it. Will you be at the meetup tomorrow night or at the general Downtown Los Angeles Drupal meetup to discuss it?

Crap filter == "Irregular

fejn's picture

Crap filter == "Irregular expression" filter?? :)

Alcohol

Tony-Mac's picture

Why not take your conversation to the corner of the bar and talk it out amongst yourselves?
Cheers!

I'm still trying to figure

bhosmer's picture

I'm still trying to figure out why I get notifications for this thread. Not that I mind at all!

Because christefano posted

mike stewart's picture

Because christefano posted this event in 14 groups. You're a member of (at least) one of them and subscribe to notifications. I suggested above his cross-postings may have been excessive.

--
mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }

It looks like you're a member

christefano's picture

It looks like you're a member of the High Performance group at http://groups.drupal.org/high-performance, or possibly another group that this event announcement has been posted to, such as DevOps or Remote Meetups.

It's very rare for discussion about our meetup announcements to go so far off-topic and I apologize for the high volume of notifications.

The default notification setting for everyone here at Drupal Groups is to send email any time content is posted in the groups that you've joined. That setting can be configured on your account settings (look for "Autosubscribe" checkbox) and fine-tuned under the "Notifications" tab at http://groups.drupal.org/user

Will the webex portion of the

oystercrackher's picture

Will the webex portion of the meeting be taking place tonight?

Yes, tonight's first

christefano's picture

Yes, tonight's first presentation is about Vagrant and it is being broadcasted and recorded now via WebEx.

I apologize for tonight's presentations being slightly behind schedule. They were originally planned to start at 8pm Pacific but started at around 8:10pm Pacific.

Slides from last night.

craigmc's picture

Please find attached slides from last night's presentation.
http://www.slideshare.net/craigmceldowney/vagrantoverview

Please feel free to follow up with questions here.

Also, if you're interested in this topic, please consider voting for stevenator and my session and BADCamp and get end-to-end discussion of chef->cloud (passing through Vagrant).
http://badcamp.net/program/sessions/someones-kitchen-dinah-chef-vagrant-aws

Los Angeles, CA

Thanks, Craig!

christefano's picture

Thanks, Craig!

In case people don't have a Slideshare account or Microsoft PowerPoint, I've attached the presentation slides to this event announcement in PDF and ODP format:

   http://groups.drupal.org/node/253493#attachments

(I tried attaching the original PPTX, too, but Drupal.org and Drupal Groups still don't allow uploading of certain office file formats. The issue for that is at https://drupal.org/node/1308156)

Thanks for the slides. I just

bhosmer's picture

Thanks for the slides. I just browsed through them.

D7 status

fejn's picture

Are the 'patches' you showed during the presentation also necessary to use Ad Manager for D7(I assume so)? Have you posted those in one of the forums (I've seen something like them on the boards, but I don't remember where it was).

No patches necessary

oseldman's picture

Just to be clear the admanager module has a full D7 version at http://drupal.org/project/google_admanager.

The 3.x branch, which includes support for the newer Google Publisher Tags is only available for D6.

In order to get this working right now with D7, you'd need to do something like the code I showed, which implemented the newer asynchronous ad tags by pasting the code from Google into the page.tpl.php file in my theme. This method would be instead of, rather than in addition to, the D7 module.