Lightning Talks

Session 1 - O.C.D. Deployment: Obsessive about Success

Time: 1:00pm-1:15pm
Company: Commerce Guys

One of the largest risks and highest costs in any project is the act of deployment. Whether this means setting up a local development environment, onboarding a new team member, demonstrating features to your client on a staging server, or pushing the latest features into production, the time and effort that each step takes directly cuts into your margin. Plus, the risk of something going wrong at the last minute is real, and ready to bite you.

With O.C.D. Deployment, you gain a new level of efficiency and security that will have major positive repercussions through your entire organization. Servers, services, and code that are ORCHESTRATED become automated and nearly instantaneously available. The CONSISTENT deployment process extends from @local to @prod. And the result, what you get at the end of the process is DETERMINISTIC. There is only one outcome, the right one, because you are operating on O.C.D. principles.

This session will not only give you the framework and tools to judge any deployment process, it will highlight the existing best practices and tools (free and commercial), as well as investigate the current weaknesses, gaps, and shortcomings.

Buzzwords: Docker, LXC, Git, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, SaltStack, DR:BD, LVM, CEPH, GlusterFS, YAML

Session 2 - MailChimp & Drupal, the Anatomy of a Successful Partnership

Time: 1:15pm-1:30pm
Company: MailChimp

When I first wrote the MailChimp module back in 2007, I had no idea what it takes to maintain any open source contrbution, not to mention a popular module used by tens of thousands of websites. All I knew was that I needed to integrate an email marketing platform into a side venture of mine  built on Drupal and that, even back then, MailChimp was easily the best option due to their innovative feature set and robust API. Soon enough, the module had hundreds of users and my side project was, well, not going anywhere. I didn't have time to give the community the support it needed and reached out to MailChimp to see if they were willing to support the module.

To their ever lasting credit, they saw the opportunity immediately and together we have grown the MailChimp Drupal module into a model of third party integration being used by over 21,000 websites. MailChimp's sibling transactional service Mandrill sports an additional 5000 users.

This session will cover the evolution of MailChimp's support for Drupal, the basics of how the integration works, and hint at what's to come for Drupal 8.