This year we have a variety of presentations for you at DrupalCon LA. These all come out of the hard work we're doing all year round on projects such as Tesla, Syfy, SNL, NBC, Bravo (to name a few), and also within the Drupal community.
What's the fuss with all this JS?
So, what's the deal with all of this javascript? Why would you want to use any of these libraries? How are they different and, maybe more importantly, how are they alike?
The Why and How of Front End Architecture
Sally Young, Carwin Young, & Wes Ruvalcaba
Front-end web development is evolving fast and selecting the right tools to use and when to use them is key to building successful solutions. Knowing why you might incorporate new techniques and what's a good fit for your needs can be challenging with so many choices available, whilst balancing client needs, team efficiency, and code quality.
De-mystifying client discovery
Greg Dunlap
It's the very first meeting with your shiny new client. A blank slate, the opening steps of a potentially year-plus long project. This is where it all begins: discovery. [...] A lot of devs get thrown into this process with no framework or roadmap of how to manage it. This talk will give them one[...]
Drupal 8 Media Status Update
Dave Reid
The Drupal 8 Contrib Media Team is making good progress on our master plan for media handling in Drupal 8. We'd like to share what we've done so far, what is left to do, and how everything fits together into the vision we have for D8 Media.
Let's Talk About Documentation
Amber Himes Matz, Joe Shindelar, & Greg Dunlap
Over the years the documentation available on drupal.org has grown, and expanded, and then grown some more. But our tools, policies, and processes for maintaining it haven't always kept up with that unchecked growth. So how can we as a community update the way we do documentation to make it as well structured, thought out, and maintained as the code base it seeks to document?
Designing for Brains: the Psychology of User Experience
Marissa Epstein
[...] discuss fundamental principles of cognitive and behavioral psychology, and how they apply to creating smooth user experiences. See the mistakes even intelligent people can make, and how you should handle them. Human-proof your designs by feeding the lizard brain, and help website visitors skip complicated thinking with simple interactions.
An Overview of the Drupal 8 Plugin System
Joe Shindelar
The Drupal 8 plugin system provides a set of guidelines and reusable code components that allow developers to expose pluggable functionality within their code and (as needed) support managing these components through the user interface. Understanding the ins and outs of the plugin system will be critical for anyone developing modules for Drupal 8.
Designing Together, Apart
Jared Ponchot
Open Source software has been conceived of, created and maintained by distributed teams, and several companies like the one I work for (Lullabot) have formed that leverage this same distributed model for a business. It's a model that seems natural for software development. But what about for other disciplines like design?
The Battle for the Body Field
Jeff Eaton
Better HTML-focused WYSIWYG tools aren't enough, adding more and more fields to the mix only complicate editors' lives, and the principles of semantic HTML don't solve the deeper problem. The work of content modeling must extend inside the body field, not just wrap around it, and that requires a more holistic approach to the design and architecture of a Drupal site.
Making Syfy.com Out of this World
Seth Brown, Mike Herchel, & Chris Albrecht
In this session the combined Lullabot and Syfy teams will discuss what was involved in creating what's been called "the best television website on the planet," as well as what lies ahead for television sites in general.