At the end of July, several coworkers and I had the chance to attend DrupalCorn 2015 in Cedar Falls, Iowa – a gathering of folks building and using the Drupal CMS, hoping to learn and share more about it. My coworker Riley and I sat in on a presentation by a guy from the Twin Cities talking about efficient caching in Drupal. If you aren’t familiar with the idea, long story short, it makes your site faster. I had never invested a lot of time in it as I usually found it frustrating, but this guy had gusto and inspired me to look not only into efficient Drupal caching, but also finding solutions for WordPress as well.
Came home, read some articles, played with some plugins, and now, the Webspec site is favored a bit more by Google Page Speed tests than it was before I listened to that talk. It may seem like a little victory, but this single, small victory translates to victories for all of our clients. It’s cool to think that all of this was sparked by a short drive to Cedar Falls and one enthusiastic guy talking about Drupal.
Keep Learning
We love this stuff. Earlier this summer, I had the chance to attend a WordCamp in Kansas City (the equivalent of DrupalCorn for the WordPress CMS) and now I’m a fiend for transients (which, as it happens, is site-level rather than server-level and browser-level caching).
Both trips were an inviting chance to brush up on established principles, learn new strategies for improving websites and discover new techniques for improving our work on a larger level. Each conference offered sessions for people from all walks of the web. Developers, designers and marketers alike had something to gain.
Inspiration from Within the Office
We relish the opportunity to expand our skills by sharing with the community around us and jump on every opportunity. But the learning process doesn’t have to be relegated to big, annual conferences. The development team specifically at Webspec is constantly learning and contributing on a group and personal level to improve the product you’re ultimately receiving.
One way we do this is by hosting biweekly “dev days” in the office. A team member drums up a topic to speak on and presents it to the rest of the developers. These topics can range from the simple – reviewing WordPress best practices or exploring a new Javascript slider library – to the complex – a crash course on the e-commerce oriented CMS Magento, for instance. Sometimes it may not be product focused, but perhaps a rundown of lesser-known shortcuts in your favorite integrated development environment.
Even when we aren’t sitting in structured settings like this, we’re constantly uncovering new solutions to both new and old problems while developing. We, like you probably do, find frustration with products we use or our day-to-day workflow. The wonderful thing about utilizing the open source software that we do is that not only can we search for a solution from other developers all over the web documenting their struggles, but we can jump in and fix even enterprise-level bugs ourselves.
“How do I know you aren’t just goofing around and wasting my time?”
Glad you asked. Let’s talk about specific examples of some of this in action.
Worst case scenario, if I want to start development on a new WordPress site, I need to go to WordPress, download core, download all of our must-use plugins, put them all in the right folder, set up a database, run the install, configure my default settings and only then start writing a theme from scratch to make the site actually look like anything. I have to download every new third-party library I want to use, and then that library slows down your site with requests to our server or a CDN.
This isn’t ideal, but it’s something that, a year ago, I did quite often. This frustration (coupled with poking the brain of a coworker) led our team to the adoption of Composer to not only get an entire site set up with a boilerplate theme by running a single script, but then also manage plugin updates. Similarly, we now leverage Bower to fetch all our third-party front-end libraries from the command line and then manage those updates. Finally, we’re running Gulp to combine all our loose scripts and styles into single files, reducing load time and bumping your Google Page Speed results a couple points.
Magic.
My coworker Eric found a similar frustration with actually launching a site to the server, so he built a tool that creates a new user account on the server, imports the database, generates SSH keys, assigns them to our BitBucket team so we’re prepped for deployment and finally spits out the markup to make sure everything is properly documented – all via a web interface. It’s lightning fast and saves us valuable time with things we used to do over and over again.
This is just in the last 6 months — all because of an innate desire to learn and improve. Sure, we’d heard of things like “git deployment” and the internet aristocracy spoke very highly of tools like Composer, Bower and Gulp, but we could have gotten along just fine without them. A core drive shared by the entire Webspec team drove us to improve these things that we’re thrilled to pass on to you.
Supporting the Community
All of these reasons are why we were happy to sponsor DrupalCorn again this year. Support from companies like Webspec enables community groups to continue to teach each other, without creating a burden on those who would like to attend. This year, we did two presentations as well, sharing what we know with the community just like they shared with us. Both presentations are embedded below.
