saint louis

DrupalCamp St. Louis 2016 will be held on September 10-11 in St. Louis, MO, on the campus of the University of Missouri, St. Louis, and we're excited to announce that session submissions are open!

We'd love to hear people speak about Drupal business, case studies, coding, community, DevOps, front end, PHP, project management, security, or any other Drupal topic. If you're interested in speaking, please submit a session for consideration, and we'll announce the selected sessions before August 1st.

I wanted to post this as a 'save the date' to any other midwestern Drupalists—here in St. Louis, we'll be hosting our third annual DrupalCamp on September 10 and 11 (Saturday and Sunday) in St. Louis, MO. We'll have sessions on Saturday, and a community/sprint day Sunday, and just like last year, we'll record all the sessions and post them to the Drupal STL YouTube channel after the Camp.

We're still working on a few details (nailing down the location, getting things set up so we can accept session submissions and registrations, etc.), but if you're interested in coming, please head over to the official DrupalCamp STL 2016 website and sign up to be notified of further information!

Last night I presented the following slides at the Ansible St. Louis meetup at Riot Games. In the presentation, I mention the motivation behind Ansible and Galaxy 2, and run through most of the major changes and new features:

I've incorporated many of the new features in Ansible 2.0 in my book, Ansible for DevOps, and will be rewriting a few of the examples in the book to take advantage of new features in Ansible 2 soon!

Yesterday I was invited by a friend to photograph the Memorial Mass for Justice Antonin Scalia at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis. Justice Scalia was a Catholic first and Supreme Court Justice second... may we all live our lives in a way where our faith, family, and morals lead our work and interaction (and not vice-versa)!

I've uploaded all the photos to Flickr: Memorial Mass for Justice Antonin Scalia, and here are a couple of my favorites below (it's hard not to have some majestic images when shooting at the Cathedral!):

The Rorate Mass is a traditional Mass held during Advent, usually early in the morning (pre-dawn) or late in the evening, where the entire church is lit only by candlelight. Mass begins with the singing of the Rorate Cæli (translated "Drop down dew, ye heavens"), and as it is a votive Mass for the Blessed Virgin Mary, white vestments are worn instead of the typical Advent violet.

In St. Louis, we had a Rorate Mass at St. James the Greater parish in Dogtown, which is a western part of the City of St. Louis (and about a 10 minute drive from my house).

Like Tenebræ, It's one of the liturgical events that's better experienced in person than viewed through the lens of a camera, but I did as much as I could with the dim candlelight available and my f/2.8 lenses (most shots were handheld):

On November 19, the St. Louis Drupal Users Group is having a party to celebrate the release of Drupal 8, which has been 4 years in the making! The party will be hosted at Spry Digital in downtown St. Louis, and will have beer provided by Manifest, food and drinks provided by Spry, and a Raspberry Pi 2 model B giveaway sponsored by Midwestern Mac!

Drupal 8.0.0 has been built by over 3,000 contributors in all corners of the globe, and will help kick off the next generation of personalized, content-driven websites. During the meetup, we'll build a brand new Drupal 8 site on the Raspberry Pi using Jeff Geerling's Drupal Pi project, and we'll highlight some of the awesome new features of Drupal 8.

After we build one of the first Drupal 8 sites, we'll give away the Raspberry Pi to a lucky winner to take home and tinker with! Special thanks to the Austin Drupal Users Group, who came up with the Pi giveaway idea!

We'll also eat, drink and be merry, celebrating the start of a new era of site building with the best version of Drupal yet!

If you'd like to join us, please RSVP on the STLDUG Meetup page: STLDUG Drupal 8.0.0 Release Party.

At long last, I found the date that the Shrewsbury, MO Walmart at Kenrick Plaza opens: September 23, 2015. I know a lot of people have asked me about this over the past year, as this blog, for some reason or another, is pretty much the only source of information about this Walmart on the Internet!

Here are a couple pictures from last week:

This is the front of the completed Walmart building, with a completely empty parking lot. I'm guessing this will be a rare sight, judging by every other Walmart I've seen.

DrupalCamp St. Louis 2015 was held this past weekend, June 20-21, 2015, at SLU LAW in downtown St. Louis. We had nine sessions and a great keynote on Saturday, and a full sprint day on Sunday.

The view coming off the elevators at SLU LAW.

Every session was recorded (slides + audio), and you can view all the sessions online:

• Keynote - Finding the entrance: Why and how to get involved with the Drupal community
• .git basics
• Empowering Content Creators Through Better UX
• Out on a TWIG: custom theme development
• Securing Drupal
• Age of Content: Building Meaningful Content Strategies
• Scale up your Drupal Search
• High Performance Drupal
• Challenges of designing for a CMS
• Status of Migrate in 8
• Closing Session

The Camp went very well, with almost sixty participants this year! We had a great time, learned a lot together, and enjoyed some great views of downtown St. Louis (check out the picture below!), and we can't wait until next year's DrupalCamp St. Louis (to be announced)!

I'll be speaking at DrupalCamp St. Louis 2015 at SLU LAW this weekend. My session, High Performance Drupal, will cover many quick performance wins for Drupal sites, and will fix an example site that simulates many performance problems seen on real-world Drupal sites.

Sorry it's been so long since posting here—I'm still working on my book, I've read through about 5 other books, and as always, I'm tinkering with a bunch of Raspberry Pis!