Monday, December 30, 2013

Drupalcon Prague notes

s one might expect, my lofty goal of watching the 20 or so DrupalCon Prague sessions I would have attended in person didn't quite work out... But here are some brief notes on the sessions I've looked at so far:


Frontend development; dancing on the tip of a hurtling rocket

This is almost verbatim why I wanted to be a librarian, and how I came to web development: "What we do as developers is provide content and provide access to that content. That is essentially the value we provide as professionals: There's information out there; we're making it possible for individuals out in the world to get to that content." -Jesse Beach

It's fascinating to think about how accessibility goals can be translated into more general applications later on. With proper DOM semantics and metadata the entire web could be twice as useful and useable.

From Not-Invented-Here to Proudly-Found-Elsewhere: A Drupal 8 Story
Alex Pott- This was marked beginner! I get the general gist, but the code examples were a bit over my head. Recommended reading on PHP- good, something helpful, recommended, up to date.

Drush Optimizations for Your Development Workflow & Drush- Do I Really Have To Use It?
Two sessions on Drush from Prague- One was all about convincing people to use Drush (already there, though not entirely clear on how it actually works with a drupal site... should, again, read the basic docs), and the other was adding Drush functionality to your contrib modules (so too advanced). Had I been in Prague, the "Getting Drush Installed" BOF would have been perfect.

Lisa Welchman Keynote: The Paradox of Open Growth
"Governance is about stewardship. It's about taking care of something." "It seems like it's really just for people who are developers. You could be more inclusive and welcoming" (slight paraphrase). Given that I know people try really hard with mentoring and so on, that seems unfortunate.

And then she brings up shape-note music as a standards practice! Crazy cross-over with my singing experience and hearing from my friend Lynn recently that she had just adapted (with her group) a traditional Chinese piece into shape note.

TBC...