DevOps has become a buzzword and a rallying cry but more than anything it is a movement to make our teams as efficient as possible through an emphasis on Culture, Automation, Measurement and Sharing. The single biggest jump our team has seen in proficiency, knowledge, and productivity happened when we switched from developing on MAMP to using virtual machines that matched our production servers. At the time, Vagrant had not yet been created and "DevOps" was not yet a word. All we knew was that we were collaborating in a way that wasn’t possible before. Soon the whole team was solving problems and improving our stack rather than just the “ops” members of the team.

Our workshop provides a crash course on optimizing your workflow, using techniques refined over years of professional Drupal work. We share our preferred development setup (including a Vagrant project we will use to build a copy of our environment), show you how to automate tests, deployments, and other tasks with Jenkins, demonstrate best practices, and work with you in small break-out groups to improve your own setup and workflow.

Topics covered, include:

Development Environment: Students should bring a laptop with a functional installation of the latest Virtualbox and Vagrant.