132 How and Why Acquia is Training Drupal Talent Before They Hire Them with Amy Parker - Modules Unraveled Podcast

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AcquiaU

While this episode might end up sounding like a giant advertisement for AcquiaU, it’s really not intended to be. I wanted to have you on to talk about the concept of, how a company that hires Drupal developers, can and should go about training them before they are hired.

In order to set the backdrop for the rest of our conversation, I’d like to quote a bit from the AcquiaU website:

The challenge the community is facing is one of supply and demand. Simply put, there just aren’t enough people to fill the needs. At any given time in the past 6 months, job aggregator Indeed.com has over 2,500 open position across the US for Drupal talent.

How do we close the gap? Find the people with the right passion and grow their talent from the inside-out. We're not looking for people with years and years of Drupal experience. We're looking for people who are curious, motivated, determined, and who can inspire a little crazy in us all. At Acquia, culture and a person's POTENTIAL to contribute and grow with us matters. A lot. These are the underpinnings of a successful candidate.

What I love about that is that you’re not looking for senior level developers with 5+ years experience. Because you’re not going to find them. They all already have jobs.

Mike and I ranted about that in the last podcast, so I won’t rehash it here, but what we boiled it down to is that Drupal shops need to create a talent pipeline for recruitment, which, as I understand it, is essentially what AcquiaU is for Acquia.

Ok, with all that said, I’ll shut up now, and let you do the talking.

  • Can you give us your description of what AcquiaU is?
    • The program is 14-weeks of hands-on training in Drupal, Acquia Products, related web technologies, and professional development skills like team building, leadership, and communication skills. We spend the first 6 weeks in a classroom environment, which is a combination of lecture, group projects, individual assignments, and self-paced learning. The most recent graduates’ project was to redesign the program’s website, u.acquia.com Each participant is assigned an Acquia Mentor who is there to not just be a buddy, but to help from a technical perspective. The next 8 weeks are spent with job rotations where they work with our customer facing Professional Services developers and customer support. Each person is assigned a client team and works side-by-side on real projects. You might think it is like any other tech bootcamp out there but we differentiate ourselves in a couple of key areas. First, we make sure we have an open job opportunity for each person who joins the program and second, we pay people to learn. Many other bootcamps have a high cost- on average up to $10,000 and while they help with job placement, I can’t say how many have jobs lined up for graduates BEFORE they join the program.
  • How do you select your candidates? Or can anyone join the class?
    • We have a rigorous screening process and look for people with 2-3 years of technology experience, but who might not be able to get a job with a development shop. A lot of times, this level of talent is overlooked because companies don’t have the internal mechanisms to train, mentor, and coach junior level talent. They are already stretched thin and want new hires to hit the ground running at a fairly high level of proficiency.
  • What types of skills do you teach?
    • We dive deep into Drupal and other web tech skills like Drush, GitHub, and Agile and a dive into our own products and services. Helping people become well rounded also means that we do workshops in team building, communication skills, and presentation skills. The next session will have an engineering focus so we will be digging into LAMP stack and web architecture.
  • Do the students have any obligation to Acquia at the end of the program? (Like they have to work for you for a given time period after the program?)
    • People are hired on as temp employees and we really hope they have had a great experience and want to stay on. The program’s goal is to hire them at Acquia or with one of our partners.
  • What percentage of students would you say you hire on average?
    • So far we have a 90% hire rate. The goal for 2016 is to expand the program and hire more people into other Drupal shops
  • Do you have information about those that you don’t hire? Do you know if they’re employed somewhere else? Or did they decide Drupal wasn’t for them?

Expanding the Concept

  • Now that you have a few classes under your belt, is this something you think other shops should look into doing?
    • People have asked me this and I think they should think about what the end goal is. Our program is not to just train more people for Acquia, but to give back to the Drupal community by creating a long-form drupal training program with learning paths and a structured hands-on curriculum.
  • We were talking before we started recording about this idea. Mike had mentioned that shops should create a talent pipeline. And while I agree with that in theory, what that means is that the shops first have to develop a training program, and one or more people who are skilled at both Drupal and teaching in a way that doesn’t alienate the trainee. From your perspective, how would you respond to that?
    • Having a talent pipleline means that you have a people development strategy that aligns to your business strategy, and that you have launched that people plan long before you launch the business strategy. Most companies play catch-up and are more reactive than proactive. Being proactive means you’re looking ahead 2-4 years out and making plans for your people.
  • If there is a shop owner out there listening right now, what would your advice be on how to go about creating a program like this?
    • I think you really have to be prepared to commit. Budgets need to allow for hiring junior talent, the business needs to be ready to bring in this level of need. It takes a lot of planning to launch a program like this. For companies that can’t support hiring 5-10 junior level talent, they should start out with a smaller number. A really strong learning program doesn’t just focus on the skills, but on different ways that people will need to learn and being able to translate really complex ideas into ways that different people will relate to. If you’ve ever heard about the adult learning cycle and experiential learning, we know that people tend to be most successful learning new skills when they can reach back into their own experience and apply them to the new content. Being a really strong developer doesn’t always mean that you can tap into other peoples’ experiences and make it relevant to them now. So when you look at creating that pipeline and having junior level talent come on board, you also have to figure out the most effective way to do it.

131 The Job Market in Drupal with Mike Anello - Modules Unraveled Podcast

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The current job market in Drupal

  • What does the job market look like in the Drupal space?
  • Let’s talk about the pipeline idea.
    • Experienced developers vs. Junior developers

What to do to start your career

  • If you’re completely new what do you do?
  • If you’re a hobbyist, what do you do?
  • How do you get experience?

From the employers perspective

  • What should job descriptions look like?

Questions from Twitter

  • Paul Booker
    How should a small business, non-profit, charity, .. find a drupal developer when they need something doing?
  • Damien McKenna
    For someone who knows nothing about web development, what's their best path forward?
  • Chris Hall
    When do you know to ask for/be a Drupal Dev vs a PHP Dev with Drupal experience? Should/is there be a difference?

130 Building Sites with Drush Recipes and Profiler Builder with Bryan Ollendyke - Modules Unraveled Podcast

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Profiler Builder

  • What is Profiler Builder?
    • Profiler Builder was created cause I’m lazy and wanted to just build a site, then figure out the profile, not build both at the same time. My work on profiler builder started to lead me toward the notion that install profiles and distributions can be more of a pain then they are worth, hence recipes.
  • Is there anything that Profiler Builder doesn’t catch?
  • How are you using Profiler Builder?

Drush Recipes

  • What is the Drush Recipes plugin
    • Drush Recipes is a series of drush calls chained together in a lightweight command-file, similar to chef and it’s recipes / roles structure.
  • Why do this instead of just using standard drush calls?
    • You might need to mess around w/ it to get a sense of some of the things you can do with it since it’s a lot more then just chain automation as it supports branching path logic, automatic recipe authoring, drush commandline recording to author recipes, the ability to take two sites and engineer the difference between them (as drush calls), remote loading of recipes, etc.
  • I use TextExpander to do this, so I just type a shortcut, and my commands are filled in. How is using Drush Recipes different?
  • Use cases for this?
    • First-time site builds
    • Development/Testing
    • drush ddt
    • drup
    • dvr
    • Chain them together (reference)
    • dwr - Interactive (What theme do you want to install?)
    • Madlib (Tokenize Drush commands)
    • Reference Make files
  • Where can we see your recipes and contribute our own?

129 Automation Tools with Solomon Gifford - Modules Unraveled Podcast

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(Part of Intro)

  • What is the most recent project you have been working on?
    • I’m glad you asked. Since transitioning to BlackMesh this past August, my focus has changed to automating the development workflow process, with a special focus of course on Drupal. I’ve been working on a project we call Cascade which leverages two open source tools, Jenkins and Ansible. A lot of Drupal developers aren’t also sysadmins - so they aren’t involved with, or maybe don’t have permissions, to take code live - they may also not have access to copy the database down for development purposes. Cascade automates this so those with the right permissions can do this with a click of a button.

Automation Tools

  • You mentioned Ansible and Jenkins - I’ve heard of Jenkins, but haven’t used it, and I haven’t even heard of Ansible. So, can you start out by explaining what they are?
    • Lets start with Jenkins - it is what is termed a Continuous Integration server - or CI for short. Other CI’s include Gitlab CI or Bamboo from Atlassian, but Jenkins is open source and has been around a long time. In simplest terms, its like a cross between a cron and a job queue that’s integrated with revision control. Think of it this way - you have multiple developers working on a project, all committing their code to Git or SVN. Hopefully you have also written some tests. Think SimpleTest for Drupal 7 or PHPUnit for Drupal 8. When each developer commits their work, you want to know if it breaks any of the tests. If it does, you don’t want their work merged or deployed. If it does pass the tests, you may want the code automatically deployed to staging, for example. Jenkins manages all that nicely.
  • Okay, I’m sure the more savvy listeners followed that perfectly. Unfortunately, I’m a little slow sometimes. :) Can you give me a concrete example of a standard operation you might perform with Jenkins?
    • Sure. Well, most small shops don’t have continuous integration set up, but its the best example. I guess I should define continuous integration - continuous integration is where developers commit their code multiple times a day and each time that code is run against all the tests you’ve written for the project. So for example, Drupal 7 ships with a bunch of SimpleTests - so assume you’re working on a project and you want to make sure that you haven’t broken any of Drupal 7’s internals. Do you want to know that as soon as you make the mistake or do you want to find that out in a couple of weeks when you are done the project? Well, with continuous integration set up, every few hours you will commit your code and Jenkins will automatically run all the Drupal SimpleTests, emailing you a report of the tests. Within a few hours of doing your work you’ll get a report of all the tests that failed - and all you had to do is commit your code. Jenkins did the rest. Of course, you would have had to set Jenkins up, but in the long run, its easier to fix mistakes soon after you make them then to go debugging code you haven’t looked at in two weeks.
  • Okay, that sounds good. As a site-builder, it sounds like Jenkins is most useful for developers writing custom modules. Is that a fair assessment?
    • CI is usually associated with development, but maybe you want to make sure that your CSS has access to the right assets - in that case, a themer would like to catch those mistakes in a staging environment earlier rather than later. So I could make the case for a themer, but generally speaking, yes, its usually something thats usually associated with development.
  • Is this something that you install on your local machine? Remote machines? All of the above?
    • Normally Jenkins is installed on a remote machine somewhere in your development environment. I’ve installed it on a VM before, so that could work too - but then you start to lose the value of Jenkins because you have to make sure the VM is running, has internet access, etc. Jenkins is something you want to set up and forget. It just does its thing.
  • So now, let’s talk about Ansible. What is it?
    • If you’ve ever heard of Chef or Puppet, it is essentially an automation tool. Immagine that we wanted to automate the setting up of our staging environment every weekend. Think about the steps involved. First, we have to copy the production database to our staging database, and then we have to check out the latest version of our staging branch. We may also need to get the latest copy of the files directory, run drush to clear the drupal cache, restart varnish and apache or use a different settings.php file. These are steps that are repetitive and that you could spend your Monday mornings doing, or you can create whats called an Ansible playbook to do it for you.
  • Interesting. So, if I’ve got a site that I’m working on, and a client that needs to review it (let’s go with your example of weekly), instead of finalizing all of my changes and updates on Friday afternoon, copying them to the staging server for review, clearing the cache, restarting varnish and apache and whatever else I need to do to get it ready for review, I can just run a single command and Ansible will do all of that for me?
    • For the most part yes. If you made any configuration changes, like Views or new content types that aren’t in a feature, you will still have to add those manually. But otherwise, yes. The repetitive tasks are what are scripted. If there is anything unique, like creating a new account with the right permissions, that may not be worth your time to script since its a one time thing, you may not want that in your ansible playbook.
  • Okay, so you mentioned Chef and Puppet, and I’ve heard of those, but not Ansible - why do you prefer Ansible over the others?
    • The big difference between Ansible and its alternatives is that Ansible doesn’t require a client script. So for example, with puppet or chef, the tasks are executed by a script running on each machine. Ansible, on the other hand, is triggered from a centralized source, say your laptop or an admin machine, which then logs into other machines to execute the commands remotely. This was an important distinction for us because it meant that we didn’t have to install all the puppet or chef dependencies on all our servers.
  • Oh, okay. So, if I have multiple sites running, whether they’re on the same server, the same hosting company, or even different hosting companies, I just install Ansible on my local (or admin machine) and everything is performed from there?
    • Exactly. As long as you can connect via ssh, you’re good. Actually, you also need at least Python 2.6 as well, but thats on most distro’s by default. For logging in, ansible’s configuration files allow you to specify the port, username and password of the remote server, or an ssh key of course. It can even su or sudo on the remote machines. What's also cool is that Ansible can run asynchronously - so if you have multiple staging machines the commands will run on each at the same time. Now, its nice if all the remote machines are the same OS - but for advanced users, you can even specify how commands are run slightly differently for different OS’s.

Use Cases

  • Okay, I can already see huge benefits of utilizing these tools. But, I’d love to get your opinion on what the benefits are for Developers/Site-builders/Themers?
    • There are two big benefits as I see them, and another not so apparent. First, a lot of these tasks are repetitive. And things like copying a database may take a bit of time. Or merging code. Or running tests. Etc. Anything that you can automate means time you can spend on other things. Second, not everyone is as experienced - or maybe they don’t have the permissions - to execute all the tasks. You don’t want mistakes, you don’t want to give everyone permissions. So you figure out the best way to do it and then you automate it. The last reason is not as obvious. I think a lot of times we hack things together in our development environments to get it working - but then may run into issues later on. We don’t spend the extra time because its temporary. By spending a little extra time getting it right, we have created a reusable pattern that we can use on our next project. By encapsulating our best practices, we not only have a quicker setup, but we have a better one too.
  • Perfect. So, save time by automating tasks like copying a database. Prevent mistakes by limiting who has permissions to execute tasks, and automating them so that even those who do have permission can’t introduce user error. And by setting up a process that uses best practices, creating new environments is faster, and better than if I had to try to remember all of the steps myself.
    • Exactly. And I’ll add, ansible can be used for each of installation, configuration, and orchestration. The examples we’ve talked about so far are orchestration - moving databases, code, etc. It can also be used to install Apache, Mysql, Mongodb, etc. Any set of system commands that are repeatable.
  • Oh... So if you’ve got a server that you have full access to, you could actually wipe and rebuild the entire server AND Drupal site? We’re not limited to just configuring the Drupal site?
    • Exactly. And throw in Vagrant into the mix and now you can do that on your local machines using Virtual machines. Immagine spinning up a brand new VM and within a few clicks you have your entire development environment with a fresh drupal install all ready for you on a VM.
  • Now, I do wonder who this is more geared toward. Developers, Site-builders or Themers. I understand that each of them can use these, and would probably help them all with their daily tasks, but who do you see benefiting the most from these tools. Or, do you have examples of people in each category that you know of that are using them?
    • I think all three benefit from automation. For example, in a previous life where I didn’t use Ansible, my themer was insanely good at theming, but when it came to running commands remotely on a server to check out his work, he was a fish out of water. I wish I had written an Ansible playbook so that he could check his code out onto staging. Or even better, if I had set up Jenkins to run an Ansible playbook to automatically check it out his work each time he committed. He wouldn’t have had to wait on me, sometimes a few days if I was not around. That said, he would not have been able create the ansible playbook.
    • As for who is using Ansible, well, Twitter does - they use it to roll out updates across their hundreds of machines. And of course BlackMesh, the hosting company I work for, also does. The product Cascade I mentioned uses ansible and Jenkins to do a lot of the things we talked about today, only we set it up so you don’t have to.

128 The Z-Ray Developer Bar with Daniel Berman - Modules Unraveled Podcast

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Z-Ray

  • So, let’s start out with the basics. What exactly is Z-Ray?

    • So Z-Ray is a cool new tech that we introduced just a few months back which gives developers deep insight into all the PHP elements constructing their page, including Drupal-specific elements.
    • It’s basically a toolbar that’s displayed right in front of you in your browser. No code changes needed. You don’t have to configure anything. Just open your app in a browser and you’ll see Z-Ray at the bottom of the page!
  • How does is work? Is there a module that you have to install on your site?

    • No. It’s not a module. Without going into too much detail: Z-Ray collects info while your app is being processed on the server side, and once the request is completed, Z-Ray’s JavaScript code is injected into the response with all the collected data.
    • There are other mechanisms at work, such as Ajax support, but as a whole that’s all there is to it. It’s also the limit of my technical understanding of how it works :-)
  • So what info does Z-Ray display? What are it’s main features?
    Well. There’re so many features in Z-Ray, and I don’t think we have the time to go over them all, but to mention just a few.

    • Z-Ray gives you info on SQL queries. You’ll see a query’s bound value, the result of the query, how long the query took, and how many rows in your code are affected by the query.
      You can even see a backtrace of the query to get the larger picture on how your code was executed.
    • Z-Ray also gives you all the errors generated by PHP itself, or those created by its core functions. You can also see errors for silenced expressions. Exceptions are also displayed.
    • What do we have for Drupal devs? Z-Ray will give you a list of loaded Drupal modules with invoked actions and hooks, a list of called Drupal functions, a list of used Drupal forms on the page, and some general user info.
    • We’re especially excited about Z-Ray Live! Until now we’ve spoken about using Z-Ray in a browser, right? But what if you’re developing APIs or a mobile app? No browser there. So Z-Ray Live! is a new feature accessible via a dedicated page in the Zend Server UI, with an embedded Z-Ray.
      So as soon as this page is loaded, Z-Ray records and displays any request made to the web server, never mind where its coming from - whether from a browser, a mobile device or a web-service client.
    • One of the coolest things about Z-Ray is that you can plug in your own customized extension. Even people in Zend itself have begun developing their own extensions so its pretty viral.
      By the way, all the code for the Drupal extension is available on Github, so feel free to fork it and send us a pull request.
    • There’s integration with IDEs, session and cookie data, request info, and so much more to talk about.
  • Is Z-Ray just for development? Or should it be used in production too?

    • Z-Ray was designed to be used both in dev and prod. While in development it works on every request, in production you can manually use Z-Ray using specially created access tokens. And it also periodically saves snapshots for important URLs - like the slowest requests on your web server, most time consuming requests, and so on. And again - with no changes to your code and no real implication on end-user experience or server performance.
  • OK, if I want to give it a shot, what does the installation process look like?

    • Z-Ray’s bundled with Zend Server, so to use Z-Ray you would need to download and install Zend Server - a total no brainer. Just like installing any other PHP stack.
  • So, how do you see Z-Ray helping Drupal developers?

    • At Zend we like to talk about left-shifting. This basically means that Z-Ray helps developers hit issues very early in the development cycle and way before going to staging and production.
    • We all know that getting clarity on all the Drupal elements working under the hood is extremely hard and takes loads of time. So at the end the day we believe that Z-Ray gives Drupal devs the visibility they need to properly profile their apps, identify bugs very early, and troubleshoot them.

127 Using Entity Pilot for Content Staging in Drupal 8 with Lee Rowlands - Modules Unraveled Podcast

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Entity Pilot

  • What is Entity Pilot?
    • I’ve been working on Entity Pilot since February, and have slowly been working through my backlog of features - but now its ready for Beta testers so that’s why I here on the show.
  • How does Entity Pilot work?
    • The basic premise is you create your content like normal and then create a new departure. You can add the content to your departure in logical groups, or you can create one departure for each piece of content - its a pretty flexible workflow. So if you were working on a new product launch you might create all of that content on your staging site. You’d be able to see what the site will look like with the new content, preview the front-page and landing pages etc.
  • You’re using airport terminology, like “baggage”, “departure” and “arrival”. Can you break those down, and explain what each one entails?
    • Passengers
    • Baggage
    • Departure - When you create the departure the baggage handler service takes care of adding the dependencies - so if you create a node, any terms or images it requires, or the author account are automatically added as baggage.
    • Arrival - On another site, you setup your Entity Pilot account and then create a new Arrival. This presents you with the list of your flights that exist in Entity Pilot for your account. After selecting the flight for the arrival, you move to the approval stage.
    • Customs - The approval stage presents you with a list of content on the incoming flight. Each item can be previewed and if it matches existing content on the site the administrator is able to view a diff of the changplanet-drupal the desired items to import are selected and imported either immediately, or via background processing.
  • How does this work in a team?
  • Talk about security
  • Pricing

Use Cases

  • For marketing: Prepare content for a product launch on the staging site. Land the content on the live site on launch day.
  • For editors: Share content between your sites. Write content once and adapt to any site in your network.
  • For developers: Deploy content when you deploy code. Use real content not lorem ipsum. Solid APIs to integrate into your custom deployment workflow or code.

126 What Varnish Can and Can't Do for Your Drupal Site with Dan Reif - Modules Unraveled Podcast

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Performance Optimization

  • Before we dive deep into Varnish, I’d like to get a feel for the various performance improvements anyone can make to speed up their Drupal. What’s the process you think through when optimizing a site?
    • DB Tuning
    • Boost
    • Memcache
    • Redis
    • APC
    • Varnish
    • Module Choices!

Varnish

  • What exactly is Varnish?
  • When researching Drupal performance optimization, I came across a lot of references to APC and Varnish. What is the difference?
  • Is this for anonymous or authenticated traffic?
  • Is the Varnish module required to utilize Varnish with Drupal?
  • What are the steps needed to install and utilize Varnish? (Broad terms, not actual terminal commands)
  • Does SSL affect Varnish?
  • What doesn’t Varnish do? (What needs to be done by Drupal, or other software instead?)
  • How does Varnish affect a dev/staging/live workflow? Does Varnish need to be instlaled on the local machine?

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