Two DrupalCon Pittsburgh Sessions (plus a new job announcement!)

By mherchel, 31 May, 2023
View of Pittsburgh with the river reflecting the sunset behind the skyline

Next week I’m attending DrupalCon Pittsburgh and I couldn’t be more excited. I’m arriving late on Friday night to attend a Drupal Association Board of Directors retreat over the weekend, and I’ll be staying an entire week to take in the ‘con.

Two [awesome] sessions (plus more) at DrupalCon Pittsburgh

I’m presenting two sessions next week as well as participating in a public Drupal Association Board of Directors meeting.

My first session is Monday at 4:10pm, where I’ll be on a panel with Tiffany Fariss and Kristen Pol discussing How to make big things happen in Drupal. The panel will be moderated by Gábor Hojtsy who will ask questions such as how to start Drupal initiatives, how to manage bikeshedding, types of contribution, etc. I have lots of thoughts on this topic, as I’ve worked hard to help contribute Olivero, responsive Views grid, single directory components, and more.

The following day (Tuesday), I’ll be participating in the public Drupal Association Board of Directors meeting at 11:30am. We’ll be voting on various topics including a strategic vision and open web manifesto.

Later at 4:10pm on Tuesday, I have my second session, Single Directory Components in Core with Mateu Bosch. If you’re not familiar with what Single Directory Components (SDC) are, I encourage you to attend. SDC is a new paradigm of theming Drupal that allows you to easily componentize your theme or module. It promises to make your theme’s code more reusable, consistent, scalable, all while also making it easier to understand! Mateu and I have been working on this presentation (which includes a section of coding karaoke!) really hard, and it’s going to be informative as well as entertaining!

I’ll be participating in contribution day on Wednesday. I have several meetings set up to discuss issues for various initiatives, and I’m also excited to help folks migrate core components to use SDC.

Thursday afternoon, I’ll be attending the Government Summit, where former colleagues John Shortess, Denise Amling, and Ryan Hillard are presenting on Let Drupal be Drupal: SBA.gov’s Conscious Recoupling. This is the project that I just rolled off of, and it tells the story of how SBA.gov went decoupled, and back.

I’m now at Agileana (and come work with me)!

I’m excited to announce that I’m now employed at Agileana! Agileana is a web development agency that “provides digital and web support services to government and publicly funded agencies”. Although today is only my second day, it’s been great so far and I’m excited to meet some of my coworkers in-person at DrupalCon.

Agileana is hiring in many roles including frontend and backend Drupal developers, designers, and more. The project that we’re ramping up to is to upgrade some 300ish websites for the US federal court system from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10. Because this is a federal contract, all roles need to be filled by people based in the United States.

A lot of people asked me if I plan on continuing my Drupal contributions, and my answer is a definitive yes. My past several jobs (Vaultes and Lullabot) left room in the margins for me to contribute. Agileana seems to value contributions with a “contribution Friday”, and I’m confident that I’ll also continue to contribute in the margins, too.

Come say hi

I’ll be in Pittsburgh from Friday to Friday, so if you run into me, definitely say hi. As far as social events, I’ll definitely be attending Monday evening’s Lullabot Party, and hanging out pretty much every night. I can’t wait!

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Swirt (not verified)

1 year 3 months ago

Congratulations Mike on the new job. Government tech is a great place to make a difference.