Annertech Proposes 8 Sessions for DrupalCon Dublin!

The countdown to DrupalCon Dublin is fast reaching zero. With just over two months left to go, the call for session proposals closed last week, with speakers to find out in the coming weeks if their sessions have been accepted or not. This year Annertech has a record breaking 8 sessions proposed!

Building a co-lingual website - lessons learned from ireland.ie

Speaker: Alan Burke
Track: Site Building

2016 marks the centenary of the 1916 rising in Dublin, a pivotal year in Irish history, and is marked with a series of high-profile events commemorating the rising. ireland.ie is the official state website for the 1916 commemoration and runs on Drupal 7.

While English is the main language in Ireland, Irish is the first official language. A decision was taken to present both languages side by side wherever possible for the 1916 commemorations - including on the website. This session will focus on the unusual co-lingual [2 languages side-by-side] approach, and how Drupal made it possible. 

Choosing Drupal - insider advice from an Irish multinational

Speaker: Alan Burke & Aisling Furlong from Glanbia
Track: Business

Struggling to sell Drupal to clients? Ever wondered what goes into the decision making process when choosing a CMS?
In 2014, Glanbia selected Drupal as the CMS of choice for marketing sites. This session will outline the decision-making process used, and what Drupal agencies can learn when pitching Drupal. This is a joint session proposal between Annertech and Glanbia.

A top-to-bottom performance overhaul

Speaker: Anthony Lindsay
Track: Performance & Scaling

Modern websites are layers upon layers of technologies, all interacting and building upon one another. Whilst technologies like BigPipe and Varnish can do wonderful things to help improve the experience of a site, if a site is poorly built, they can only do so much. Caching a rubbish site still delivers rubbish. This talk aims to bring you through the areas we look at when giving a site a performance overhaul.

Bridging the PhoneGap: Getting Started Creating Hybrid Mobile Apps with Drupal and Ionic Framework

Speaker: Mark Conroy
Track: Horizons

With the advent of hybrid mobile apps, you can continue being a Drupal frontend developer and also build apps without needing to learn new technologies. The mobile web is quickly catching up with native apps. The mobile web is free, and open, and available to all of us right now and doesn't bind us to proprietary systems. With the many advances being made in this area, we can create great mobile experiences for users.

When the cloud bursts - dealing with the collapse of AberdeenCloud

Speaker: Tommy Jørgensen
Track: DevOps

AberdeenCloud was one of the pioneering companies in the world of managed Drupal hosting. On 28th June 2016, without any official warning, it collapsed entirely leaving many Drupal sites completely unavailable. This session will look at how this situation arose, and how we in Annertech dealt with it. On a more general level we look at our approach to off-site backups for cloud hosted services to avoid being left in the dark. It will build upon my blog post The Day that Aberdeen Cloud went Bye-bye.

Future Directions for Drupal Accessibility

Speaker: Andrew Macpherson
Track: Core Conversations

Drupal has made great advances in accessibility over several major releases, and nowadays ranks as a leading implementation of web accessibility standards.  This session will encourage contributors to look ahead at future challenges and opportunities for accessibility during the faster 8.x (and 9.x) release cycle. 

Happiness is... remote working.

Speaker: Anthony Lindsay
Track: Being Human

Many Drupal agencies have remote workers. Some are entirely distributed. Whilst remote working is beneficial to all concerned in so many ways, it does come with its own challenges. This talk will cover the journey I took when I moved from a typical 9-5 office job and joined Annertech, which is an entirely distributed Drupal agency. It will highlight the challenges I found: the good, the bad, the funny and the downright surprising, and offer as examples, my experiences for staying happy and healthy in what has the potential to be an isolating environment. 

Support Done Right, or Keeping Clients Happy

Speaker: Anthony Lindsay
Track: Business

This talk will look at the Annertech approach to supporting our clients needs, wants and desires for far longer than the length of a site build. We'll look at things like communication, task management, estimations, project lifecycles, customer needs, staffing needs and even the very nature of what 'support' actually means. We'll explain how support is so much more than answering calls. 

With over 620 sessions submitted in total, it won't be possible for all our sessions to be accepted, but given the quality of these submissions, I'm hopeful that some of them will make it through to the final cut. Fingers crossed!