Everybody would love to spend weeks in a detailed discovery exercise; writing nitty gritty of the application in product backlog and thinking through on the application architecture before submitting the proposal. Unfortunately, dreams don’t come true!

Getting the estimation right in the sales cycle quickly (especially in early stages) is probably what strengthens any agency chance to win the project. So how you’d go about making your best shot with limited resources/time of your architects/developers?

This session would be focussed on below mentioned points; it would be a story with examples and demos:

1. Making the best use of early interactions; probing clients with questions to get the view of the application.
2. Building initial set of stories/feature list (as a backlog)
3. Story point estimation of the backlog (and not the hours!)
4. Define clear dark areas in the scope; calling them out early. Show clients the zeal to clarify the scope.  
5. Translating the estimation into a loading sheet; define the burn rate.
6. Goto step 4; refine the scope again. Rinse, Repeat!
7. Congratulations! You’ve shown clear investment in the project with the client. You’re already way ahead in the game.

This session will be easy to understand for people with intermidiate level knowledge of Project management and Sales. However the session should be open for beginners.

The goal of this training is to help people who have messed around in CSS wrap their heads around the harder concepts of CSS and go on to show advanced tips and tricks. There'll be discussion, exercises, fancy slides, and surprise guests and audience participants (if you want!)

We'll be going over:

• CSS Layout in 2017 (how to use grid, flexbox, and when to use the old stand bys)
• Document flow, who can be your best friend (but may currently be your enemy)
• CSS architecture with topics like:
  • Code writing tips and organization that can help keep CSS maintainable
  • Different approaches to class names and applying CSS and their pros/cons
  • Gotchas, tips, and myth busting on performance, organization, integrating CSS with your CMS (we'll use Drupal as the example)
• Tips on building CSS in an existing system, or creating on of your own
• Debugging CSS
  • The tools to debug
  • How to debug different kinds of layout issues
  • Exercises/examples of common bugs
• Transitions/Animations in CSS
• Advanced CSS techniques and tricks
• Favorite tips and tricks (guest speakers and audience participation welcome!)

Diverse work environment is a key for the successful growth of development team that can utilize different experiences and skills of team members with multicultural backgrounds. Diversity makes us stronger and allows to approach common problems from different angles. However, effective integration of people from different backgrounds into work environment can be challenging for both business owners and newcomers alike.

Communication difficulties and cultural challenges can be overwhelming, therefore in this talk I'd like to cover some approaches and steps that could be taken to bridge gaps in intercultural collaboration in work environments and allow new members of the team enrich work process with their experiences and successfully integrate into the team.

The talk will contain tips and strategies for both business owners and newcomers. Regardless of job role you will be able to learn new information about challenges and benefits of diverse work teams.

An effective testing strategy demands many tools in our tool belts. Let’s take a look at some tests, environments, and tools for Test-Driven Development (TDD):

• Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) ensures the application functions as we are intending, and serves as documentation. We’ll look at leveraging existing Behat definitions and explore opportunities to compose our own.
• Visual regression testing is great for ensuring your site keeps looking the way it is supposed to when changes are introduced.
• Unit testing is fast, cheap, and perfect for testing granular functions. We can also extend Drupal classes to test the Kernel, Browser, and JavaScript bases.

If you’re a Techie, possibility is you’ve at least heard of Docker. It's a helpful tool for packing, shipping, and running applications within “containers.”
It’d be hard not to, with all the attention it’s getting these days — from developers and system admins alike. 

Regardless of whether or not you have an immediate use-case in mind for Docker, I still think 
it’s important to understand some of the fundamental concepts around what a “container” is and how it compares to a Virtual Machine (VM).

We would like to focus on below highlights in this session:

• What are containers and VMs?
• Unpacking the jargon Virtual machines and hypervisor
• Containers and how it is different from VMs
• Say hello to Docker
• Fundamental Docker Concepts: [ Docker Engines, Client, Daemon, Dockerfile, Image, Union File Systems, Volumes, Docker Containers
• Unpacking Containers: Namespaces, Control groups, Isolated Union file system
• The future of Docker and VMs

Attendees will get knowledge to learn more about Docker and maybe even use it in a project one day.

After years of designing and building websites, Senior UX Designer Marissa Epstein and Senior Front-end Developer Mike Herchel have a lot of opinions about what makes a good site experience. 

Join them for a rant about what causes the most friction for your users and learn what you can do about them in your own projects. They’ll provide designer and developer solutions for such problems as

• Slow loading
• Interruptions
• Awkward layouts
• Janky interactions
• Weak mobile experiences
• Dealing with stakeholders that ask for 💩. 

This session is great for front-end devs and designers, or anyone curious about either area. Stop annoying your users and allow them to get stuff done!

Nowadays Drupal is not simply a CMS, it's a big and complicated framework that stands behind large enterprise level websites.

Drupal is used successfully for government, high education and healthcare websites that store large volumes of data. Often enough these organizations need their data to be updated over night, monthly or annually. It can be as simple as stock information updates performed once an hour and as big as update of all programs and courses offered by the college and university including all of the program details and costs.

Large scale complicated imports bring their challenges: time and hosting resources, parsing algorithms, different sources: XML, JSON, CSV. In my talk I'll cover some problems that a developer may face while building imports of data from various external sources into Drupal. I'll cover different formats such as XML, CSV and JSON, as well as approaches that can be used to make the task easier.

The audience will learn how to build imports with solid architecture so they would have less problems with performance as well as won't be limited by cron job time. I will also cover Batch and Queue APIs in Drupal 8 as well as touch base on continuous integration tool such as Jenkins.

The talk is for intermediate to advanced level back-end developers.

Backdrop CMS is the Drupal fork. It is a faster and less-complex version of Drupal 7 with many of the top 50 Drupal 7 modules included in core. Backdrop also includes proper configuration management for quick and easy deployment of settings changes along with code.

Backdrop CMS has been out for more than 3 years, and has seen 9 on-time releases that have added more new core features - including a few you won't find in Drupal 8 (yet). Backdrop core includes built-in automatic URLs, page redirects, and a tool for adding new modules directly from your existing site. Backdrop also includes an updated administrative theme, a new front-end theme, dozens of User Experience improvements, and improved APIs for developers. Plus, Backdrop has a dragon!

Backdrop is an affordable alternative for upgrading existing Drupal sites. Backdrop will always provide an upgrade path (via update.php) and maintains 80% code compatibility between major versions. Decreasing the amount of time spent on development, maintenance, and upgrades will help keep costs down. Backdrop CMS is committed to making sure the small to medium sized businesses and non-profits have a full-featured and powerful CMS too.

Come and see if Backdrop CMS is a match for your next project!

Inheriting a legacy code base can be a smooth hand off, or like kicking a hornet’s nest. What is the best route forward in these situations? Do you continue to development on an aging code base, absent of any requirements, or do you burn it all to the ground to start over fresh free of all technical debt? Which option is best for the health of the project? What are the consequences of the choices? Is it an all or nothing nuclear option?

We’ll share past experiences with both approaches, how to handle some of the pain points that will arise from inheriting a legacy projects, as well as indicators to key off of in order to find the best path forward.

Contributing a module to the Drupal community is a gift of your time, energy and passion.  Maintinaing and continuing to improve upon that gift can often have a negative effect on your balance.  This session provides tips, tricks and techniques for making continued maintenance of your module smooth, painless and productive.   Highly recommended for anyone who is either planning to release a module or is currently a maintainer of a module.

Back in the day, pixels were a themer's best friend when it came to setting dimensions in CSS.  Way back in the day, they were a themer's ONLY friend.  Then came em (and rem) units.  For the past several years, as vw (viewport width) and vh (viewport height) units have enjoyed wider support among modern browsers, they have become increasingly popular among themers.

In this session, I will take participants along on my journey into the wonderful world of these latest scalable units, and how we can use them in conjunction with Sass to yield displays that are more consistent at any viewport size.  I will show how scalable units can help ease the pain of unpredictable results when content editors are let loose in a WYSIWYG environment; through the creative use of scalable units, we can create pages that are closer to their authors' intent.

I will also highlight cases where the use of vh and vw units might yield undesired results (such as unreadably small or unreasonably large text), and I will demonstrate how I have used Sass logic and math to overcome these obstacles.

Every newbie dreams of being a contributor to the Drupal project. But where do you begin? And more importantly, what are some of the tools to help navigate the adventure successfully?

In this session, we will go over a couple of the tools of the trade that will help you while you work in the Drupal issue queue as a novice.

The session concludes with a live lightning round demonstration of the process that includes: creating an issue, writing a patch, uploading the fix to Drupal.org, and reviewing the patch for  RTBC (Reviewed & tested by the community).

Tools of the trade:

Simplytest.me -

• What is Simplytest.me? And how does it make life easier?
• Evaluating a module and its dependencies
• Applying a patch
• Uploading new modules to current test site

Git Client -

• Why use a Git client versus only using Command line?
• How to create a branch and properly name it for the issue
• Committing changes to the repository
• Creating a patch

Dreditor -

• What is Dreditor?
• Installing Dreditor and a quick demo of functionality
• How does it help in the issue queue?

Intended audience: Community members who want to contribute back to the Drupal project but have perhaps felt left out because of lack of experience, technical skills, or job description.

Anticipated outcome: Empowering the community with some basic knowledge and technical skills to help them gain experience in coding and documentation, build their Drupal profile and reputation, and help collaborate with the Drupal project.

In the global world, it helps if your site can speak multiple languages - even if you don't. Taking an existing site and localizing it, or building a new site with a localization requirement can be a daunting task if you've never tackled it before. Fortunately, there are some solid guidelines that can help smooth the way for a seamless launch of your fully translated site.

We'll discuss common pitfalls in new development, things to look for on existing sites that are adding a localization element and maybe even throw in a few examples of what NOT to do if there's time.

Many developers, including myself, deal with mental health issues, yet mental health in the developer community is often overlooked, hidden, or swept under the rug. Too many of us suffer in silence and end up hurting our professional and personal relationships, or even worse, ourselves.

What can be done to help de-stigmatize mental health issues? How can we, as a community, band together to help those of us with mental health issues feel more welcome in tech?

Together, we can work to Erase the Stigma associated with mental illness.

Are you ready for the epic battle between paragraphs and core entities? Are you excited to dive into beyond basic site building with Drupal 8? In this session we will try to solve common site building tasks with paragraphs module and without it. The audience will be able to explore the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches and define the champion in Drupal 8 site building... or maybe it will be a tie?! Want to find out? Come to a session and battle down through challenges and adventures Drupal site builders face on a daily basis building web solutions from smaller websites to entreprise scale portals!

This presentation will focus on a one-click approach to creating migrations in D8 from a CSV file without having to write any code. The no code content migration approach will be discussed using a new D8 module in the works: Contentin. 

The Contentin module dynamically registers a migration from CSV file with one click. Currently, a new helper module called Contentout is being used to produce the hierarchical CSV file (preserves field:subfield, multi-value fields, provides indexing, etc.) that the Contentin module can use to register migrations without writing any custom code.

The links to the code for the D7 versions of the Contentin and Contentout modules can be found on my profile page: https://www.drupal.org/u/iribarne

Drupal Development Workflow Turned to 11.

With Pantheon you can already enhance your development workflow utilizing their dev, stage, and live environments. I’ll share how you can take that workflow and turn it to 11.

• Automagically spin up local environments to match Pantheon using docker (Docksal)
• Easily pull in and sync your projects in Pantheon
• Automated testing (Visual regression, Behavioral, Unit)
• Continuous Delivery (Deploy to Pantheon after every successful merged pull request)
• Integration with chatops
• Giving way to our robot overlords

Getting any free softwhere to the point where it makes money can be a lot of work. Taking a WordPress plugin like Better WP Security (now iThemes Security) to more than 2.5 million downloads when it isn’t your full-time job can seem nearly impossible. This talk will discuss how I built Better WP Security to one of the largest plugins on WordPress.org including what I did right and what I could have done better as well as why the plugin was built for WordPress instead of Drupal. Specific tips will involve handling support, marketing a plugin and squashing bugs when you wear all the hats (developer, marketer, teacher, project manager, etc). This session will help to equip you with the tools you will need to not just get your software out there but also to make sure it is successful.

Here is a video of a previous rendition of the talk at WordCamp Orlando: https://wordpress.tv/2016/01/14/chris-wiegman-lessons-in-plugin-developm...

At least 19% of the overall population in the US has some sort of a disability. And yet, we in the Drupal community could do much better when it comes to serving the needs of those individuals.

It’s not easy for fully-abled designers and developers to feel empathy for the disabled. This talk will address that empathy gap by taking a close look at the obstacles disabled users encounter and the assistive technologies meant to overcome them. You'll experience how users with disabilities like low vision and blindness interact with websites. You’ll gain a real-world understanding of where most organizations and site builders go wrong, and how it can be fixed.

The past two years have brought a flood of lawsuits which have changed accessibility from a nice-to-have feature to a fundamental requirement for most websites and apps. We'll cover a couple of these landmark cases and learn how to keep your clients out of court and avoid common accessibility mistakes.

For those looking to bring accessibility into their own practice, this session will share tools and techniques along with resources and training opportunities for building and designing for web accessibility.

---

[speaker's note: my proposed session would be an updated version of a presentation I gave to the IxDA in November that's been modified for the Drupal community. Here's a link to the original slide deck.]

Docksal is a Docker-based development tool that removes hurdles from creating a local development environment and greatly reduces the time needed to onboard a new developer to a project.

Some of the topics that we will cover will include:

• Create a local development environment in minutes*
• Maintain the environment configuration via source control
• Create custom commands to automate expedite development tasks
• Integrating Docksal with a pre-existing projects

Normally in a web development agency, your focus is on the front end, consumer-facing side of a website. Yes, we talk about the administration but mostly defer to "it is what it is" and "that's just how Drupal works." With the rise in popularity of decoupled infrastructures, more clients are shifting their focus on improving the Drupal Administration UX.

From a business perspective an editor often has more say in the support and success of your CMS then the end user browsing the site so the editor persona should be considered throughout the development process. In this session, we'll dive into how ways of improving hte editorial experience with contrib modules, architectural choices and some custom code additions.

What to expect:

• How is design/UX reversing to focus on the editorial experience?
• What contrib modules currently enhance the editorial experience?
• How can a better editorial experience be beneficial to your client?
• Where is the future of editorial experiences and Drupal heading?