Last week we returned from DrupalNorth in Montreal. It’s the largest camp in Canada, with a rotating location. Being based in Brooklyn, it’s an easy 11 hour train ride to Montreal, so this year was an ideal time to venture out of the states to our neighbor to the north.
Four full days of Drupal: A day of training, two days of sessions, and a full day of sprints. This was a serious event! We were honored to be selected to present our session NoOps with DevShop: Continuous Integration in a Box.
Great Sessions
I kicked off my camp with a session on Using blackfire.io to Profile your Loading Time presented by my long time friend Alex Dergachev and Dave Vasilevsky from Evolving Web. They told great stories of massive improvements they made to their sites just by giving it a quick analysis with the Blackfire tool from SensioLabs, the creators of Symfony. I definitely think we need to add this blackfire tool to our server management roles.
Awesome session on @blackfireio by @evolvingweb's @dergachev. We have to get a server role for this! #DrupalNorth pic.twitter.com/XXDkAxsFJt
— OpenDevShop (@OpenDevShop) June 17, 2016
One of my favorite sessions was Accessible Continuous Integration by Adam Bergstein. The story of making it easy for the entire team to participate in CI is in exact alignment with our philosophy. It really struck a chord with the audience as well. Video is available on YouTube.
"The problem is not the tools, it's that they are not approachable."
-@nerdstein at #DrupalNorth pic.twitter.com/vUcLK7bwsD— OpenDevShop (@OpenDevShop) June 18, 2016
Aegir Cooperative Sprints: HTTPS for All!
One of the big reasons I decided to attend is that most of the maintainers of Aegir and members of the newly formed Aegir Cooperative live near Montreal. It was a great opportunity to talk and work together on bug fixes and new features.
During the sprints (which really is any spare moment between interesting sessions) Christopher and Colan Schwartz were able to put together a new system for managing SSL in Aegir called Aegir HTTPS. This new system is a better way to handle certificates than Aegir SSL, and enables automatic HTTPS via the LetsEncrypt.org service.
This means that every single site hosted by Aegir will be able to get free HTTPS, automatically. Very, very exciting stuff. Secure by default is the way it should be.
In addition to all this work, Christoper put on a great version of the classic session One Drupal to Rule them All. He nailed it, despite not even having a projector for the first 20 minutes!
No-Ops with DevShop
I decided to give a talk on the theme of Continuous Integration, but with a twist: The goal is no longer to have “Good DevOps”. The goal is No-Ops: A system where no interaction is needed other than developers pushing code.
The talk went well. I think the theme of “Spending too much time on DevOps” is a pretty strong one that I will continue to talk about in the future.
See you next year!
Huge thanks to the Montreal and Canadian Drupal Community! Congratulations on a great camp.