New England Regional Developers - Fundamentals

Joomla 101

dawn.russell — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 17:46:34 +0000

In this informative session, you'll be introduced to the Joomla! Content Management System through a demonstration style presentation that walks you through the process of setting up a Joomla! site including categories, articles, menu items, modules, and template installation. We'll review the capabilities of the Joomla! Content Management system along with how to expand its core offerings with proprietary extensions, plugins and modules. Showcase websites will be included to illustrate the capabilities.

Experience level:

Beginner

Session Time Slot(s):

Time:

Sep 12 2014 - 3:00pm-Sep 12 2014 - 3:50pm

Room:

162-75

Allowed Types:

Session

Session Track:

Session Tracks (NERDSummit 2014)

Fundamentals

Sessions Topics:

Fundamentals

Development

Speaker Bio(s):

Dawn Russell formed Artisan Web and Print, located in downtown Brattleboro Vermont, in 2010 after completing graduate studies in Web Development at Marlboro Graduate School. She trained extensively with author and Joomla! expert Barrie North for two years before taking over his small hosting company and customer base at My Artisan Web (formerly Simplweb). Her skills in design were cultivated during her Master's program at SUNY New Paltz in Fine Art where she took every opportunity to visit museums and design houses in New York City. It was during this time that she refined her eye, aesthetic and love for design and art. Her combination of design, business savvy, and technological knowledge provides a unique blend for her clients.

Shaping Your Free Software Project... and the World?

mlncn — Sat, 16 Aug 2014 04:00:49 +0000

We'll talk about the fundamentals of participating in Free Software projects and communities, which is why this is in the Fundamentals track, but we'll also talk about how we as individuals and as groups can shape what our powerful software is built to do— and how we build power through coördination in the context of extreme power inequalities that we, mere web developers and other information technology workers, are well-positioned to change, which is why this could be in the Revolution track, if there was one.

How Do You Make a Difference?

Challenges you might want to take on and possible courses of action which we'll discuss include:

There's some feature you want or want to make better:: Learn, publicize, code, document, coordinate, fund.
Not a proportionate number of contributors to beneficiaries:: Make involvement more accessible, varied, encouraged.
Contributors to the community good not always secure financially:: Form coalitions, better passing of work & employment, crowdfunding.
Common needs are going unmet:: Create a better way to coordinate and contribute.

Participation in the session (or comments to this post right now) from people seeking an outcome and people who know what your particular software community most wants, and how to engage, very welcome.

Who Owns Free Software?

WordPress isn't owned by Matt Mulenwegg or Automattic and Drupal does not belong to Dries Buytaert or the Drupal Association. As Free Software released under the GPL, it belongs to you (and every other person who steps up to claim it) equally.

Free Software is a form of wealth that everyone shares.

What does it mean to accept this ownership?

Black Star Co-Op Pub & Brewery [in Austin, Texas] opened doors in the summer of 2010, with a large banner outside reading "Community-Owned Beer." A consumer cooperative (owned by the community it serves) and also a worker-coop (run by its employees), Black Star is attracting a full house of business seven days a week.

From A Cooperative Economy by Carmen Llanes

Our banner should be Community-Owned Software. And we can learn from the co-operative movement, and its acceptance of buyer and worker cooperatives, including hybrids like Black Star. Both builders of the software and users of the software can step up and claim ownership in different ways.

Why Us?

It's time to get involved— and to reap the benefits of participation. Second-order benefits are "you participate and good things will/may happen as a consequence."

First-order benefits are immediate from the act of participating itself. Nothing big, except by the accumulation of many little things. Participating makes you better. These direct benefits are specific to forms of participation so will be discussed along with the ways and means of participating.

But most of all, shaping a part of the future of our Free Software projects means shaping our own future, and potentially our community and our world's future.

If we — workers with direct access to software powering much of the Web and enough time to come to this awesome summit — don't coordinate to take relatively small and simple collective actions that make our immediate professional environment better, how will we — the broader community of humans on this planet — build the networks and tools needed to stop exploitation, prevent violence, avert or deal with global warming, and otherwise move toward justice, liberty, prosperity, and simple survival for all?

We can do our part simply by figuring out still better and more sustainable ways to make our software and community better— like coming together to add or improve features, support contributors, and meet common needs.

Experience level:

Intermediate

Session Time Slot(s):

Time:

Sep 14 2014 - 1:30pm-Sep 14 2014 - 2:30pm

Room:

163C

Allowed Types:

Session

Session Track:

Session Tracks (NERDSummit 2014)

Fundamentals

Sessions Topics:

Fundamentals

Strategy

Code for Change

Speaker Bio(s):

Benjamin Melançon (mlncn) lives and works to connect ideas, resources, and people to help us all gain as much power possible over our own lives.

He re-found Drupal in 2006 and co-founded Agaric, a web development and consulting collective which helps people create and use powerful Internet technology, in the same year. He remains a principal of Agaric and an advocate of worker co-operatives. Recently, as CTO of Activore (building communities supportive of better health and fitness) he had the opportunity to play with many non-Drupal technologies. This led to the formation of a Spry Group and Agaric joint venture, ImageScale, to bring the goodness of Drupal's imagecache approach to everyone.

Probably best known in the Drupal community for posting problems he runs into (and occasionally solutions he stumbles over) to data.agaric.com, this somehow to have led to writing, joined by three dozen authors, The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7.

Currently in his non-existent spare time Ben pushes the Snowball initiative to create a user-need-led collaborative funding platform for Drupal projects.

Setup Rails and build Twitter!

khadijahthegreat — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 21:54:28 +0000

In this track, learners will learn about the basics of the Rails 4 environment and learn how to set it up for development and build an app that works just like twitter! We will deploy our apps to heroku to share with our friends. I will also share more resources for learning.

Experience level:

Beginner

Session Time Slot(s):

Time:

Sep 12 2014 - 2:00pm-Sep 12 2014 - 2:50pm

Room:

162-75

Allowed Types:

Session

Session Track:

Session Tracks (NERDSummit 2014)

Fundamentals

Sessions Topics:

Development

Requested Session:

Beginner training: CMS installs, Module/Plugins/Theme installs, Basic Config

Sass Primer: CSS Pixie Dust

donmateo — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 16:25:35 +0000

If you've made a website lately, you've used CSS. If you've used CSS there's probably a head-sized dent in the wall near your desk! Sass is an amazingly useful CSS pre-processor that brings a suite of programmatic tools such as variables, operators and functions to your CSS. It helps you keep your style code tidy and dry by letting you nest styles inside the selectors to which they apply, and break your styles into logically organized partial files among other wonders. Sass is a powerful tool, meaning if you're not careful it can help you to implement bad choices on a huge scale, so we'll also cover how to use CSS and Sass responsibly.

Experience level:

Intermediate

Session Track:

Session Tracks (NERDSummit 2014)

Fundamentals

Sessions Topics:

Fundamentals

Design

Development

Intro to HTML/CSS

Susan Buck — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 15:45:54 +0000

HTML and CSS are sibling markup languages that every web site is built with. HTML serves as the structure, with CSS adding style. If you think of a house, HTML would be the foundation, the walls, the doors…and CSS would be the paint color, the light fixtures, the curtains, etc. In this session, we’ll have a crash course on the basics to put together a web page with HTML and CSS:

Tools for writing your code
Working with HTML tags like headings, lists, images, links
Adding style with CSS
Getting your work online

Experience level:

Beginner

Session Time Slot(s):

Time:

Sep 12 2014 - 9:00am-Sep 12 2014 - 9:50am

Room:

177

Allowed Types:

Session

Session Track:

Session Tracks (NERDSummit 2014)

Fundamentals

Sessions Topics:

Fundamentals

Friday Keynote: Susan Buck, "So you want to be a developer..."

Susan Buck — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 15:44:41 +0000

As an instructor with the Women's Coding Collective, at the Harvard Extension School, and Wellesley College, I spend a lot of time teaching people how to code. As one would expect, this invariably leads to lots of calls for advice from students: How do I get started in this field?

In this keynote, I'll walk through the advice I typically give when faced with this very good question.

Key points:

Understanding what developers do
Deciding the kind of work you want to do and the kind of work environment you want
Choosing where to learn
Building your own portfolio
Getting jobs and/or clients

Experience level:

Beginner

Session Time Slot(s):

Time:

Sep 12 2014 - 4:00pm-Sep 12 2014 - 5:00pm

Room:

163C

Allowed Types:

Session

Session Track:

Session Tracks (NERDSummit 2014)

Fundamentals

Sessions Topics:

Fundamentals

Strategy

Speaker Bio(s):

Susan Buck is a programmer, designer, and educator with over 15 years of web development experience, starting with her education in digital media at NYU's Interactive Telecommunication Program and UNC Asheville's New Media program.

Most recently, Susan co-founded the Women's Coding Collective, an educational initiative aimed at helping more women excel in programming and web development. While working on the WCC, Susan also teaches Dynamic Web Applications with the Harvard Extension School and Harvard Summer School.