appearances

MidCamp 2018 wrapped up with a bang today, as there was another year full of great training, sessions, and my favorite aspect, the 'hallway track' (where you go around and network between and during some sessions with tons of excellent Drupalists from the Midwest and around the country).

This year, I presented two sessions; one a co-presentation with Chris Urban titled Local Dev Environments for Dummies, the other a solo presentation titled Jenkins or: How I learned to stop worrying and love automation.

Embedded below are the video recordings of the sessions (recorded as always by the excellent Kevin Thull of Blue Drop Shop!):

The St. Louis Drupal Users Group (STLDUG) just finished it's fourth Drupal Camp, held at UMSL yesterday. I had a great time meeting with everyone, and am excited for next year! Last year I had to miss the Camp due to unexpected surgery, but this year I was able to attend and even bring some of my photo gear, to take pictures (I love contributing to open source through means other than code!); here's the obligatory 'whole camp' photo:

You can view all my photos from the camp in an album on Flickr: Drupal Camp St. Louis 2017 photos by geerlingguy

I presented Just Keep Swimming! Or, how not to drown in your open source project at DrupalCon Baltimore 2017, as part of the Being Human track. Below is a text summary of the presentation (along with the associated slides).

Here's a video of the presentation; scroll past it to read through a transcript and slides:

And the slides/transcript:

Update: The BoF has come and passed... and I put up a comprehensive summary of the session here: Composer and Drupal are still strange bedfellows.

Tomorrow (Wednesday, April 25), I'm leading a Birds of a Feather (BoF) at DrupalCon Baltimore titled Managing Drupal sites with Composer (3:45 - 4:45 p.m. in room 305).

I've built four Drupal 8 websites now, and for each site, I have battle scars from working with Composer (read my Tips for Managing Drupal 8 projects with Composer). Even some of the tools that I use alongside composer—for project scaffolding, managing dependencies, patching things, etc.—have changed quite a bit over the past year.

MidCamp is one of my favorite Drupal events—it hits the sweet spot (at least for me) in terms of diversity, topics, and camp size. I was ecstatic when one of my session submissions was accepted, and just finished presenting Developing for Drupal 8 with Drupal VM.

You can see slides from the presentation here: Drupal VM for Drupal 8 Development, but without the full video there are a lot of gaps (especially on slides where there's just a giant emoji!). Luckily, Kevin Thull of Blue Drop Shop is hard at work recording all the sessions and posting them to YouTube. He's already processed the video from my session, and it's available below:

I'm excited to be presenting at this year's DrupalCon Baltimore on a topic near and dear to my heart: I'll be presenting Just Keep Swimming: Don't drown in your open source project! at DrupalCon next month.

On a basic level, I'll outline ways I deal with rage-inducingly-vague bug reports, hundreds of GitHub notifications per day, angry and entitled users, and keep a positive attitude that allows me to continue to contribute on a daily basis.

Yesterday I presented Drupal VM Tips & Tricks at the DrupalDC meetup, remotely. I didn't have a lot of time to prepare anything for the presentation, but I thought it would be valuable to walk through some of the neat features of Drupal VM people might not know about.

Here's the video from the presentation:

Some relevant links mentioned during the presentation:

A few months ago, when I spoke at php[tek] in St. Louis, I had the honor of being interviewed by Cal Evans on the Voices of the elePHPant podcast! In the interview, we discussed Drupal 8, Acquia, the Raspberry Pi Dramble, and the PHP community.

Check out the interview: Interview with Jeff Geerling - Voices of the elePHPant.

There's also a video recording of the podcast, embedded below:

It's been a few weeks since AnsibleFest San Francisco, and Ansible just posted the video recordings of all the sessions from AnsibleFest SF 2016! I was honored to be able to speak about Ansible Roles at this year's west coast AnsibleFest, and I also arrived a little early so I could participate in the Ansible Contributor Conference on July 27.

Picture from my session courtesy of The Appnel Group.

The time is here! The rest of the DrupalCamp St. Louis 2016 organizers and I were working feverishly this week to get all our ducks in a row, and we now have online registration opened up for DrupalCamp St. Louis 2016! Here are the relevant details:

• Dates: September 10 & 11, 2016
• Location: University of Missouri, St. Louis
• Keynote: Larry Garfield, "Software Management Lessons from the 1960s"
• Price: $35, or $15 for students (Register on Eventbrite)

You'll get a snazzy T-Shirt, a catered lunch, and the fuzzy warm feeling of being part of the great Drupal open source community! Plus I'll be there!