conference

Most of the Affinity Bridge team will be heading south to this year's PNW Drupal Summit (which rotates between Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland, and is in Portland this year). There will be two official sessions that our team members will be presenting that you might want to check out if you're coming to the conference:

Best practices for running a Drupal-based business (Panel)

10:10am - Saturday, October 15, 2011

Mack is going to be part of a business panel that will be addressing various questions and ideas related to running a Drupal based company. Topics they'll be discussing include: how to find good clients, how to find and keep a good team, pricing, and best practices. More details on the session page.

Using Build Kit & the Kit specification to build Drupal distributions

2:30pm - Sunday, October 16, 2011

This past weekend we attended the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit and I gave an introduction to open data and beautiful maps. I talked about open data, covered the creation of a map in under 10 minutes, and discussed how to create beautiful maps using advanced techniques like custom tilesets. The video is already online thanks to the hard work of Justin Carlson, posted on his blog here and embedded below:

Tylor Sherman: Open Data & Beautiful Maps from Carlson Media on Vimeo.

It was an incredibly jam-packed weekend for Drupallers here in the Pacific Northwest, with the 2nd annual PNW Drupal Summit in Vancouver. The Summit is a weekend conference that is targeted towards people already working with Drupal (moderate to advanced level), and is done in a regional mini-DrupalCon style: pre-scheduled sessions/tracks, keynotes from Drupal 7 maintainer Angie Byron (aka. webchick) and Chapter 3's Josh Koenig (aka. joshk), and Drupal 7 code sprints (that resulted in bringing the Drupal 7 criticals count from 13 to 8 over the course of the weekend, HOOAH!)

Did you miss out on last year's PNW Drupal Summit in Seattle, here's your chance to attend! Our second annual regional Drupal developer conference is in Vancouver this year, October 2-3 at Robson Square.

Last year's conference was a fantastic weekend of sessions oriented towards developers, business/management, themers, designers, and power-user/configurers. This year is sure to be another stellar line up of presentations, workshops, and birds-of-a-feather (aka. BOF) sessions to educate and enthuse all intermediate to advanced developers, and anyone else who manages, documents, designs for, or administers any Drupal sites.

A bunch of the Affinity Bridge crew went down to Seattle the weekend before last for the much anticipated Pacific North West Drupal Summit - Mack, Robin, Shiraz, Shawn, and myself (Ariane) made it down (Zoe was meant to come but picked up a cold in Italy and didn't want to contagious it to everyone), and Dave Tarc and Scott Nelson who have been collaborating on a couple projects rounded out the posse. It's always great catching up with the rest of the PNW Drupallers, it really is a hotbed of Drupal activity, and we were lucky enough to be joined by many of our Drupal friends and colleagues who came in from Portland, Idaho, and even Montana.

(Thanks for the sweet photo to Steve Krueger of The Jibe)

Just a reminder, we're just a month and a bit away from the PNW Drupal Summit in Seattle, October 24-25.  It's a regional conference, a little more con than a camp, a little more camp than a con...most of the AB crew is heading down for it, and I have no doubt it'll be great!

Create an account on the site to register, and mark your attendance on your profile.  For folks in the Vancouver area, there's a wiki page on g.d.o for travel planning.  And be sure to pitch a session - there are a lot of great ones already!

Big thanks to the crew in Seattle, especially Jared (aka. rocksoup) who's spearheaded the effort, for all their hard work getting this organized!

DrupalCon is about to descend on Paris in a matter of days. Sadly no, I will not be attending. But you're in luck, because our very own Disseminator of Awesome Shawn is on his way to represent Affinity Bridge and enjoy his first DrupalCon! In my absence, I thought I would write up a little DrupalCon End-User Guide of sorts, for all those first timers out there. Finding the optimal balance of geekery and socializing is key to making the most of the week, so consider these tips to lead you on the path to finding that balance.