Rolando Scott
Technical Account Manager & Senior Drupal Lead
San José, Costa Rica
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I put out fires... No, really...
I literally & figuratively put out fires.
When not fighting real fires as a volunteer firefighter, I'm fighting Drupal fires and helping our clients realize all the potential and awesomeness of Open Source hosting on Amazee.io / Lagoon.
Living the life currently in San Jose, Costa Rica!
Playing the Odds with the DC Lottery Website Rebuild
Unless you plan on winning the lottery, you could probably use some new ideas and strategies on how to tackle large, complex Drupal builds! In this session we'll talk about the complexities of migrating and rebuilding the public informational DC Lottery website. We’ll provide insight into the strategies we used to face the unique challenges of this site – and empower you to apply those strategies in your own work.
The first challenge we’ll share is navigating the migration of the site from an outdated, proprietary CMS to Drupal. We'll talk about the complications along the way, like the fact that we had to port over content that dated all the way back to 1984, including: 3.5 million drawing numbers all in different formats, hundreds of games, scratchers, winners and prizes. And, of course - we couldn’t forget the thousands of active daily users!
Getting the content to Drupal was just half the battle - next we had to figure out how to organize it in a way that made sense, but that could also be accessible and easy to find. We’ll also discuss how we approached the unique challenge of managing content when new information is added or edited on the site every 5 minutes, almost 24/7.
In the end we'll share how the combined strategies gave us an amazing site that has both the users from the DC community - and our client - thrilled, with plans to expand our partnership and continue to grow and optimize the site.
Perhaps, you’re looking for an Alien!
We've all seen those ridiculous job ads: 20 years experience on technology that hasn't existed for 10. MBAs and other high qualifications for a Junior role. What about needing C++ and Assembly for a Front-end role? Maybe those cases are extreme, but is your job ad or hiring process good enough to find the correct Drupal candidates you are looking for?
Let's talk about what is actually needed to bring in high performing, empathetic and effective collaborators to your organization. Drupal developers come in all shapes, forms and sizes, and finding the right one is key to your team's success.
We'll go through techniques, strategies, and what values to look for, and more importantly, the environment you should be fostering and supporting to have these developers interested in your organization in the first place. In today's landscape, its definitely a two way street between employers and employees.
This session is dedicated to hiring managers, and anyone that is involved in interviewing but would also be good for anyone that it looking to be hired soon.
Advanced Configuration Management
It's been a few years since Configuration Management made its way into all our projects, and while mostly everyone understands the basics of it, there's still a lot of misconceptions and untapped potential into this unique feature.
So lets dive deeper into Configuration Management and the amazing things you can do with it. Lets talk about YAML and the specific version used for Drupal and why that's important. Lets talk about modules that extend Configuration Management and why they could be the solution you need for your next project.
We'll discuss what types of configuration you need to include in your next custom module, and to spot the difference where it matters if you explicitly create the configuration or when Drupal does it for you. We'll talk about hacks and when it makes sense to edit it directly.
And lastly, we'll talk about generating Configuration from outside of Drupal, and the interesting cases that came come out it.
This is a session for people that know Configuration Management and want to extend their knowledge even further.
Tackling Configuration Management Head On
While being one of the best features of Drupal 8/9, configuration management is still a mystery to most non-technical folks. What exactly is a change that triggers a config file change, what needs to be committed, what happens when the configuration is synced, etc.
And once we understand what a configuration change is, how it affects the site, and how not to have conflicts, we will explore contrib modules that expand the capabilities of configuration and open up new workflows and capabilities. We'll go over real-world examples using Config Split, Config Ignore and others. We will also see how configuration is managed through various hosting partners like Acquia, Pantheon and others.
This is perfect for content creators and project managers who want to understand configuration management better. The session is also directed to any non-technical person who has felt the frustration of their changes being wiped out because a developer committed code and synced configuration.
Playing the odds with a DC Lottery website Rebuild
In this session we'll talk about the complexities of migrating and rebuilding the official DC Lottery website. We migrated the site from an outdated custom CMS to Drupal 8/9. We'll talk about the complications along the way, like the fact that we had to port over 3.5 million drawing numbers, dating all the way back to 1984, hundreds of games, scratchers, winners and prizes, along with the thousands of the active daily users.
Organizing the content in a way that made sense, but that could also be accessible and easy to find for our users was quite a challenge, especially on a website that gets updated with new content every 5 minutes, almost 24/7. Having to come up with a Virtual Events platform & giving users access to a custom user dashboard are some of the additional challenges we will cover.
In the end we'll share how the combined strategies gave us an amazing site that has both users and our client thrilled, with plans to expand it even further.
Growing Pains: Moving from Developer to Manager
There you are, a senior developer, minding your own business when suddenly you are trusted into a manager role. Now what? What should you do, and when is the right time to panic?
Let's go on a journey to learn how to make that transition a successful one.. from having to deal with immediate challenges like managing people that just a short time ago were your peers, all the way to how to set yourself up for future growth.
Going from a developer to a manager is essentially a career change, albeit in the same industry, yet it is a natural and expected progression in any agency.
Let's tackle that imposter syndrome head-on. As a direct manager or team leader, you have more to do with your team's happiness than anyone else in the company. Embrace that responsibility and learn to make everyone around you a better person and a better employee for the company.
Dev Management as a Custom Drupal Module
Taking THE big step into management is hard. While there are tons of resources and courses on how to be a good leader, this session will utilize the critical thinking tools developers use when considering building a custom module, and how that relates to some of the common pitfalls and challenges of becoming a new manager and good leader.
This session is a fun & relatable introduction into developer management roles, but also serves as reminders to people that currently lead teams. We will go through the planning of a module, and how this relates to planning out your team goals and tasks. How unexpected bugs are sure to occur in both cases and how to tackle them. We'll talk about how requirements can shift and cause extra headaches and how to try to anticipate issues of your teams ever changing needs.
At the end we will also talk about the traits that intersect between being a good leader and being a good developer, such as listening skills, perseverance, decisiveness, integrity, and more.
If you know how to create a custom module, you can also learn to become a leader in your organization!
Build Specs, the most important step before writing a single line of code.
Let's talk about all the legwork and preparation you should be doing, planning out every website before a single line of code is ever written. Planning out a site, specifying components, requirements and more will allow the developers working on your site to spend less time figuring things out, and more time working, unblocked. It will also allow less scope creep and allow you to either fend of the client or generate more change orders!
The Power of Open Source Web Hosting
The Open Website Alliance was co-founded by major open source CMS communities TYPO3, Drupal, and Joomla. It represents an open effort to enhance web technology standards and practices across these applications. amazee.io's Lagoon provides an Open Source web hosting solution based on Kubernetes. Its developer-first approach promotes flexibility, reliability, and open source from top to bottom, significantly reducing web developers' operational overhead.
Come along and see why these CMS communities are again rallying behind an open source approach and how embracing open source hosting can be a powerful complement to your open source strategy.
Join me in championing the open web from top to bottom: Your Open Website Alliance sites like Drupal are built on open source software - shouldn't they be hosted on an Open Source platform, too?
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