Hook 42 at BADCamp 2017 - Sessions, Trainings, and Summits!

Drawing of people holding up a Drupal log, reads "It takes a village"

BADCamp is back and Hook 42 is embracing all the magical goodness! This year we are not only a proud sponsor of the largest free Drupal Camp, but we also have the awesome opportunity to share our expertise across several platforms. Join us at our Supercharged SEO & Accessibility training, the DevOps Summit, and four sessions.

Trainings:

Supercharged SEO & Accessibility

With Aimee Degnan and Carie Fisher | Wednesday October 18th, 8:00am - 5:00pm | Alumini House - Sibley Room

SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization." Improving your website's SEO can translate into more visitors, better conversions, and more sales.

Accessibility refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people who experience disabilities.

This is why people care about both and why you should, too!

When properly configured, Drupal is a very SEO-friendly and Accessible web framework. The trick is to know which Drupal modules you need to install and how to optimally configure them. Configuration doesn’t stop at the module level - a solid content strategy is required to make the most Accessible and optimized website. “Content is King” and our job is to make Drupal showcase content in the most effective way to all consumers and search engines.

This full-day training will enable you with the tools and knowledge to make YOUR website more Accessible to everyone, including Google!

Learning Objectives
The Hook 42 team will help you:

  • Understand what SEO and Accessibility are and why they are important to web business.
  • Cover the do's and don’ts of general SEO and Accessibility practices.
  • Apply SEO and Accessibility practices to a Drupal environment.
  • Know the modules needed to prepare a website to support SEO and Accessibility.
  • Configure system level, module level, and content level settings to support SEO and Accessibility.
  • Use tools and techniques to test and tune your SEO and Accessibility configurations.
  • How to support an SEO and Accessibility tuned site over time.

Syllabus / Agenda
Each section of the class will include a combination of lecture steps and guided hands-on exercises. In the configuration sections of the training, we will be enabling, configuring, and testing modules. In the content-targeted sections, we will be performing site building tasks with content-specific SEO and Accessibility configurations.

Summits:

DevOps Summit

Thursday October 19th, 8:00am - 5:00pm | MLK Student Union - East Pauley Ballroom

The DevOps Summit is about inspiring people (aka YOU) with new processes and tools to help transform ideas into working web applications. They’ll be discussing topics like automated testing, continuous integration, local development, ChatOps, and more. Anyone who is looking to work with happier development teams while saving time and money should attend.

Hook 42's Tara Neier will be discussing the intricacies of AWS Cloudformation.

Sessions:

A/B Testing with Optimizely

Kristen Pol  | Saturday October 21th,  11:15am - 12:00pm | MLK Student Union - Tilden

A/B testing can be a useful technique for identifying how changes on web pages affect user engagement and conversions. There are several tools available to implement A/B testing including the popular Optimizely.

This session will cover A/B testing in general as well as some common use cases and features for Optimizely including:

  • Changing simple things like color or text
  • Adding new content
  • Removing things from the page
  • Configuring for phones or tablets
  • Using redirects for full-page testing
  • Preview of some advanced features

Intended Audience
Anyone who is interested in learning about A/B testing to improve UX in general and what you can do with Optimizely in particular will benefit from this session.

Skill Levels
This session is suitable for beginners and intermediates.

Dred(itor) the Issue Queue? Don't - It's Simple(lytest) to Git in!

AmyJune Hineline | Friday October 20th,  9:00am - 9:45am | Career Center - Blue

Every newbie dreams of being a contributor to the Drupal project. But where do you begin? And more importantly, what are some of the tools to help navigate the adventure successfully? In this session, we will go over a couple of the gadgets necessary for working in the Drupal issue queue when being a novice. We will also have a lightning round demonstrating the process of creating an issue, writing a patch, uploading the fix to Drupal.org, and then reviewing the patch for RTBC.

Tools of the trade:

Simplytest.me -

  • What is Simplytest.me? And how does it make life easy?
  • Evaluating a module and its dependencies
  • Applying a patch
  • Uploading new modules to current test site

Git Client -

  • Why use a Git client versus only using Command line
  • How to create a branch and properly name it for the issue
  • Committing changes to the repository
  • Creating a patch

Dreditor -

  • What is Dreditor?
  • Installing Dreditor and a quick demo of functionality
  • How does it help in the issue queue?

Healing a Broken Project

Aimee Degnan | Friday October 21th,  3:45pm - 4:30pm | MLK Student Union - Stephens Lounge

What happens when you encounter a project that seems broken beyond repair, but for whatever reasons, a brand-new fresh start is not possible.

You may run into the following challenges with these "broken projects":

  • No clear scope
  • No requirements documentation
  • Far less remaining budget
  • Far less remaining time
  • "Project fatigue" from the client
  • Massive amounts of technical debt
  • And many, many more challenges...
  • How do you even start approaching such a broken project and bring chaos to order?

But what does order really mean? How does one measure success or completion in a fog of wrongness?!

Using project management and enterprise process management techniques, you can work through unclear and incomplete deliverables to help define what Done (success) means. This includes unraveling complex business logic, multiple business processes, and a slew of modules and configurations.

At the same time, we were proactively healing the client’s project pain by finally being able to articulate a clear list of what needs to be built versus what has been built.

We even got to answer the final burning questions:

When will it be done and how much is it going to cost?

Learning Outcomes

  • Starting assumptions may not completely prepare the team for the project.
  • Identify and proactively address stakeholder’s project fatigue and apprehension.
  • Explore practical techniques to unravel and define the half-built and the unknown.
  • Understand that tools and techniques are really applying the “best practice for the situation” and which tool you use will evolve through the project recovery process.
  • Understand how to prepare your project team for the road to recovery with the client.

Inclusive Development: Using Style Guides to Improve Website Accessibility

Carie Fisher | Thursday October 20th,  4:45pm - 5:30pm | MLK Student Union - East Pauley Ballroom

We wear a lot of hats as front-end developers. Depending on the client or company you work for, you may be the designer, UX/UI specialist, site-builder, QA tester, and developer all rolled into one. How can we possibly add the accessibility hat on top of all that? What accessible pieces should we even include? Which pieces are easy wins vs. impossible juggernauts? How do we implement inclusive development when a project does not have a lot of time or budget to include that piece? One way we can tackle these issues is by using an accessible component driven approach. By thinking about inclusiveness from the start, we can get a head start on accessibility while still building the required site components.

In the spring of 2017, I developed an open-source KSS node style guide demonstrating good accessibility practices. The style guide comes with pre-populated accessible components that include helpful links to related tools and articles to make your site more inclusive. These components also serve as a guide for both HTML markup and SCSS/CSS code, to inform designers, front-end and back-end developers at every stage of the website’s creation.

Session Outline

  • What exactly is the role of a Front-end developer?
  • What, Who, and Why of Website Accessibility
  • What is Inclusive Development?
  • Why use Component Driven Development for Accessibility?
  • Demonstration of KSS node-based accessible style guide - http://a11y-style-guide.com/style-guide

Ready, Git Set, Go!

Lindsay Gaudinier | Thursday October 20th,  1:30pm - 2:15pm | Career Center - Blue 

Let's go over the jargon and basic setup of git in a safe space. Git is a magical gift from Linus Torvalds, but it also a monster that needs its occasional blood sacrifice. Let's git the basics down (head, rebase, pull, push, branches, repository, remote, merge, stash, cherry-pick, conflicts, and more!). We can git through this together!

Last, but most certainly not least - The Hallway track!

Find the team in the halls, at the party, and in the coder lounge for conversation and rad SWAG! We are super excited to see familar faces and create new relationships.