We did it again! 5 Annertech sessions accepted for DrupalCon Vienna

On Friday, all the accepted sessions for DrupalCon Vienna were announced, and we are delighted to report that, once again, 5 of our 8 session proposals were accepted! With Acquia and Pantheon being the only companies receiving more acceptances, we are extremely proud of our achievement. It also means that given our size, Annertech has more speakers, per staff member, than any other agency in the world.

This is the second year in a row, where we have had 5 sessions accepted for DrupalCon, and, along with FreistilBox, are the only Irish web agency to be represented. Our sessions this year span a number of different tracks, namely Project Management, Site Building, Performance and Scaling, Front End and Core Conversations, and cover topics such as building multilingual sites in Drupal 8, project forecasting, debugging performance issues, component-based design/development, and accessibility. Congratulations to all our speakers!

Live Performance Workshop: A top-to-bottom performance overhaul

Speaker: Anthony Lindsay
Track: Performance and Scaling

In this interactive workshop style presentation, we'll take a terrible, awful, broken sample site, look at all the nasty ways that its performance is terrible, and fix them, one by one. We'll get the audience involved with suggestions at every step of the way.

All examples will be taken from real life experiences, but no real sites will be harmed in the making of this demo/session.

Lessons Learned from Building a Large Multilingual, Multi-region Site in Drupal 8

Speaker: Stella Power
Track: Site Building

Having recently launched a Drupal 8 website with 13 distinct languages across 4 different regions, this session will take you from the basics of configuring your content to be multilingual through to making it localised in different regions and the various pitfalls encountered and lessons learned along the way.

Estimates are dead, long live forecasting!

Speaker: Mike King
Track: Project Management

In his session, Mike will outline the good, the bad and the downright wasteful aspects of estimates and how they’re used, before contrasting it all with the positive benefits of using forecasting to communicate a range of outcomes and how this can be communicated with the wider team. There will also be a follow-up BoF to share open source tools so that everyone can take home this new set of skills.

Back to the Future: No More Static Mockups!

Speaker: Mark Conroy
Track: Front End

This presentation will be an easy-going rant about how to make things better for frontend developers and will start by taking a look at Photoshop, SketchApp and InVision and how these tools fail to deliver (by building up expectations for clients and problems for implementers). We will then move on to talking about designing in the browser and how tools such as PatternLab and Fractal (basically HTML, CSS, and JS - the foundation of the web) can help solve these problems. Finally, we'll look at how we can (easily) integrate PatternLab with Drupal, thereby going 'Back to the Future'.

Core Accessibility: How are we doing, and what can we do better?

Speaker: Andrew Macpherson (and Théodore Biadala and Kristen Pol)
Track: Core Conversations

As we build Drupal websites, our exposure to the world of accessibility is often driven by the client or website owner. If they have accessibility requirements, we learn about these and try to meet their needs. Sometimes, it's driven by our own desire or need to make our websites consumable for more people.

In Drupal core, we've been making great strides incorporating accessibility best practices into the UX and markup. It’s not only important to help increase Drupal product adoption in some markets (e.g. the public sector) that have strict accessibility requirements, but accessibility is important to make Drupal sites reach the most people with varying backgrounds and abilities. This can be good for business. It is certainly good for our humanity.

Congratulations to Anthony, Stella, Andrew, Mike and Mark on their great achievement. We look forward to seeing these and all the other great sessions at DrupalCon Vienna in September. Hope to see you there!