With DrupalCon Nashville right around the corner, we’re already picking out our favorite sessions. With such a wide variety of presentations, we’re looking forward to talks about everything from DevOps to project management. Here are just a handful of sessions we’re excited about. Which sessions are you attending?
Project Management
1. Creating a PM Career Within the Drupal Community
This session introduces five panelists who are current and former project managers. They’ll talk about their career paths and the choices that lead them to where they are now. Some basic questions for the panelists will include:
- What is it like to be a PM within the Drupal Community?
- What are the different career paths for a PM?
- How does one stay happy and fulfilled within the role?
- How do you prepare yourself to move to the next level?
- Do certifications matter?
- How do you make a freelance career work in this community.
Session Track: Project Management
Experience Level: Beginner
When and Where: Wednesday, 4/11 at 3:45 pm; Room 205C
Content and Editorial
2. What Am I Getting Myself Into? A Drupal Crash Course for Content Managers
This session offers the resources that project and content managers need to work with Drupal. Without being too technical, this session will appeal to beginners and non-developers. Attendees will learn:
- Drupal terminology
- The pillars of Drupal core functionality
- How to optimize their Drupal site
- Specific considerations that the development team should address
- How to set up a “sandbox” in order to experiment with Drupal
Session Track: Content and Editorial
Experience Level: Beginner
When and Where: Tuesday, 4/10 at 10:45 am; Room 103B
Being Human
3. Succeeding as an Introvert
This seems to be a common underlying conflict for most introverts – “Can we still be introverted and be successful, too?” This session seeks to inform you that being an extrovert is not required for success.
Although this session doesn’t directly focus on Drupal, it brings up a lot of challenges that many people probably face in the tech industry. This session will take a scientific look at introversion and extroversion, how they’re different, how to tell where your personality falls on the scale, and what advantages each personality type has in the workplace.
Session Track: Being Human
Experience Level: Beginner
When and Where: Wednesday, 4/11 at 10:45 am; Room 204
Business
4. More Social, Less Media: Harnessing Human Connection to Achieve Marketing Success
Sometimes we get caught up in churning out original content and increasing our social media reach; however, this session explains that the people are what make a business unique.
Your team is the most marketable asset that will set your business apart from others. This session serves to put industry trends to the side in order to focus on what an organization has to offer. Each team member offers something unique that can be marketable to clients. This session will teach attendees:
- To uncover hidden strengths within your team
- To co-market with current customers
- To define key differentiators
- To make the most of in person events
Session Track: Business
Experience Level: Beginner
When and Where: Wednesday, 4/11 at 2:50 pm; Room 205AB
DevOps
5. Automate Your Automation
Although automated tests are awesome and make projects much more enjoyable to work on, they can be a hassle to set up. However, the time investment can save on testing time and increase the reliability of releases in the long run. This session will teach attendees how to automate repetitive startup tasks to further streamline their workflow. Attendees will:
- Make or use a template project with starter tests and clone it with a script
- Configure authentication credentials in a testing service with a script
- Create pull requests automatically within a script
- Keep dependencies up-to-date using an automated service
There is no detour to setting up tests, but this session will cover resources that will help streamline the testing process. Attendees should be familiar with automation services such as Circle CI, Travis, GitHub, or similar services.
Session Track: DevOps
Experience Level: Intermediate
When and Where: Tuesday, 4/10 at 5:00 pm; Room 201
And of course we’ll be supporting our team members Dan and Randall! Our lead developer, Dan Hansen, will present a talk about PDFs in Drupal, and Sevaa Group’s director, Randall Kent, is talking about testing with Cypress. As a sponsor, we’ll have a booth (#719) set up so that you can come talk to us about anything and everything Drupal. We’ll also be giving away free swag and raffling off a special gift! See you there!
