presentations

One of the most difficult hurdles for new members of the Drupal community to overcome is making the jump from a "user" to a "contributor". Many associate "contributor" with core hackers, PHP gurus, and CSS wizards. In reality, any Drupal user or site builder can easily become a contributor, through support, advocacy, documentation, and so on. For more information, check out the attached slides, or see the Drupal.org Contribution page.

I just finished giving a presentation at DrupalCamp Montreal about using Subversion to manage Drupal development and deployment. I've attached the slides and code I mentioned during the seminar; video will be posted by the DCM DBN team soon.

Yesterday I gave a presentation to the Waterloo Region Drupal User Group about the basics of using Subversion to manage a Drupal website. Most of the presentation applies to any use of Subversion, though I do touch on a few specifics relating to Drupal. If you're interested in learning about using version control to manage any website or project, this is a great place to start.

Tonight I gave the Waterloo Region User Group a presentation introducing jQuery and it's use within Drupal websites. Topics covered included:

• What JavaScript is and isn't
• How JavaScript empowers developers to transform web pages into web applications
• Why many developers have avoided JavaScript in the past, and how jQuery addresses those issues
• JavaScript developer tools
• Introduction and live demos using jQuery

Tonight I gave a presentation to the Waterloo Region User Group about choosing a host for a Drupal based site. We talked about the essential requirements on top of the Drupal requirements, types of hosting, and our experiences with various hosts. I think the results of the discussion can be summed up as "you get what you pay for"! I've attached the presentation slides for anyone interested.

The essential features I noted as being important include:

Here is a copy of my presentation from my research seminar. Feel free to contact me with any questions you might have.

Here are the slides being presented on Monday, December 1st. They provide an overview of the prospects for computer scientists today and in the future. For more information, contact CISters or the CIS department at the University of Guelph.