Austin Drupal

The first Austin Drupal Dojo at Mangia

The Drupal Camp Austin videos are up at Vimeo. If you missed the presentations, here's your chance to catch them.

Because this is the week of the Austin Drupal Meetup, the weekly Austin Drupal Dojo will not be held this week.

For this month's Drupal Meetup topic, Jerad Bitner, co-founder of Rapid Waters Development will be discussing some of the tools used in rapid and large-scale Drupal deployments - specifically, Devel and Backup and Migrate. Jerad will be taking this information from his planned DrupalconSF presentation, where he will focus showcasing "local environment, development environment, moving data between the two, talk about keeping object such as Panels and Views in code, basic installation profiles, and other best practices."
The meeting is Wednesday the 17th, 7PM at Mangia. For more details, see the meetup page. Hope you can make it.

Despite the overall job situation nowadays, for a Drupal developer/designer, things look pretty good. There are way more drupal jobs and contracts than the local talent can fill. Way more.

For quite some time, I've been discussing with the other folks in the Austin Drupal community how to bring more beginners up to speed, and how to help the intermediate level folks become drupal ninjas.

While there are a tremendous amount of resources for those wanting to learn Drupal, it's important to connect and share experiences with other drupalfolk. Previously, the only regular opportunities for Drupalistas to meet up have been the monthly meetups.

This last week, myself and a few others in the community, launched the Austin Drupal Dojo. Call it a hack night or whatever, this is a weekly opportunity to get together with other folks in the Austin Drupal community. No agenda. No speakers. Bring your problems, bring your solutions, bring your laptop.

The word Dojo (道場) captures what we're trying to create -- a place to practice and master one's art. Thing of it as a place to become a Drupal blackbelt, a Drupal Ninja.

I should say that we're not the first in town to do this. Matt Buck launched the Ruby Dojo last November, and there has been a virtual Drupal Dojo at groups.drupal.org for quite some time. Although he doesn't use the word "dojo", Jim Hillhouse has been hosting the weekly Cocoa Coder meetings Conjunctured for over a year now.

If you're looking to ramp your skills up quickly, meeting weekly makes a difference.

Our first meeting last week at Mangia was a great success. So much so that we've reserved dates for the next 8 weeks. Tentatively, the dojo will be held at either Mangia (Spicewood and Mesa) or Triumph Cafe. Both venues are centrally located near Spicewood/Anderson and Mopac.

Here are the tentative dates for the upcoming dojos:

SXSW 2010
In addition to Dries Buytaert's panel at SXSWi (which I announced previously), Josh Koenig and Jeff Eaton will also be speaking at SXSWi 2010. This is a great opportunity to see these folks without having to pass through a full body scanner. Here's the details:

R.I.P. Content Management System
Organizer: Dries Buytaert (wikipedia), creator of Drupal and founder of Acquia

Drupal in the Cloud!
Organizer: Josh Koenig, Co-founder of Chapter Three
I've seen a version of this talk. It's a must see for folks deploying a CMS/CMF to the cloud.

Selling Your Milk When the Cow is Free
Organizer: Jeff Eaton of Lullabot
Lullabot is, without a doubt, the leading Drupal design/development/traning company. Good talk for those who want to learn how to build a successful business based on open source.

Drinks and Drupal this Wednesday
I'm hosting a get together this Wednesday at Triumph Cafe for all my fellow Austin Drupalistas. There will be no presentations. This is just a opportunity to catch up with each other. Austin's Drupal community extends from south of Ben White all the way up to Cedar Park and Round Rock. I chose Triumph Cafe because it's easily accessible from Mopac and pretty much dead center. There's plenty of free parking. Triumph has beer, wine, espresso, sandwiches and great Pho. I hope you can join us.
The facebook event page is here:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=221577022633

New leadership for Austin Drupal Meetup
Lauren Roth, who did an excellent job organizing this last year's Drupal Meetup presentations, has followed the siren's call to the Bay Area. Before leaving, she passed the torch for Austin's group to Elizabeth Quintanilla and Kerry LaRose. I think Lauren made an excellent choice. If you haven't Elizabeth and Kerry yet, come by Drinks and Drupal this Wednesday at Triumph Cafe.

-Lynn

Some pretty big news this week for my fellow Austin drupalistas.

The University of Texas has just selected Drupal as the content management system (CMS) for core pages within the www.utexas.edu directory structure. Their report states that:

Drupal was found to meet nearly all of the project’s documented high-level requirements, either through core functionality or available contributed modules. Two requirements identified early on as critical to the success of this project were configurable workflows and scalability through high-availability caching. We determined that Drupal fulfills both of these requirements using off-the-shelf free and open source modules.

The report goes on to state:

Since the Drupal project is deeply committed to the open source philosophy, there is a very large community of developers who are continually contributing new functionality back to the Drupal ecosystem either through contributed modules, or patches to the core product itself. Additionally, there are a growing number of companies offering commercial consulting, training, and support services for Drupal.

Read the full story at: http://blogs.utexas.edu/refresh/2009/12/02/cms-selection-process-results/

GeekAustin's Drupal feed is available at: http://geekaustin.org/austin-drupal/feed

Registration is going fine without a hitch. The folks at Norris have a great facility.

Rachel at PetRelocation just told me about a in-house web developer /programmer position that they have. It sounds like a choice full time gig for the right person.