Drupal NYC Meetup @ 30 Rock - February 3rd

Welcome to Drupal NYC!

Please join us on Wednesday, February 3rd for our 5th meetup at 30 Rock!

Presenters for this evening will be Preston So (GraphQL), Jacob Rockowitz (YAML) & Nikhil Dubbaka (Visual Regression Testing & Drupal).

You must enter your real name on the RSVP question or your RSVP will be removed. Check-in opens at 6pm sharp, see you on February 3rd!

Agenda
• 6:00 - Check-in opens, socializing + pizza
• 6:30 - Announcements
• 6:45 - Who's hiring, who's looking?
• 6:50 - Talks begin!
• 8:20 - Closing Remarks, socializing + leftover pizza
• 8:45 - Afterparty @ Bill’s Bar & Burger (1 block north, 16 W. 51st St., accessible via Rockefeller Concourse) https://goo.gl/maps/Eghs2

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Talks & Speakers

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YAML, What is it good for? by Jacob Rockowitz

YAML is a simple, easy to learn markup language that is used to solve some very difficult problems in Drupal 8.. While building the new MSKCC.org website in Drupal 8, YAML was used to solve some very preplexing problems. This presentation will introduce everyone to YAML and show how it was used to solve a major challenge for the MSKCC.org website.

Bio
Jacob Rockowitz (https://www.drupal.org/u/jrockowitz), is a consultant who has worked with Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) for the past 15 years, worked with Drupal for the past 7 years, and with the help of Phase2 Technologies (https://www.phase2technology.com/) pushed MSK to become an early adopter of Drupal 8.

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Introduction to GraphQL by Preston So

GraphQL has been deemed everything from the death knell of RESTful architectures to the query language of the future. Created by Facebook to power its data fetching and coming to Drupal 8 thanks to Sebastian Siemssen, GraphQL portends a dizzying shift in not only how client-side applications request and receive data but also how payloads are interpreted and formatted on the server side. What exactly is GraphQL, and what distinguishes it from the rest (no pun intended)? What are the weaknesses of REST that GraphQL aims to resolve? What differentiates GraphQL from plain old JSON?

Bio
Preston So (https://www.drupal.org/u/prestonso) has designed and developed websites since 2001 and built them in Drupal since 2007. He is Development Manager of Acquia Labs at Acquia, where he works on new open-source and product initiatives. Previously, Preston was Technical Lead of Entertainment Weekly at Time Inc. and co-founded the Southern Colorado Drupal User Group (est. 2008). Since 2008, Preston has spoken at conferences across the U.S. and on two continents (most recently DrupalCon Barcelona 2015 and DrupalCon Los Angeles 2015) on topics such as decoupled Drupal, (responsive) design, front-end development, user experience, and cutting-edge code.

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Visual Regression Testing and Drupal by Nikhil Dubbaka

Breaking is easy, testing is hard. Small, unexpected front-end changes are tough to spot manually and can be a signal for larger problems. Rapid development cycles, large page counts and developer fatigue can make it difficult to catch even visually obvious mistakes before they go live. Enter Drulenium(Drupal + Selenium): the automated process of capturing, tracking, and analyzing screenshots to catch unexpected changes as they happen. This talk will focus on 3 key topics: 1) What is Visual testing, 2) Drulenium 3) hands-on demos. We will describe a serverless solution that will help Drupal community to adopt testing without huge efforts or expensive resources allocation.

Bio
Nikhil Dubbaka worked as Drupal lead at edX ( https://www.edx.org/ ) in Boston. He recently moved to NYC and actively looking for opportunities. He goes by TechNikh on Drupal.org and Twitter.

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Want to present at Drupal NYC?!
We are always looking for new talks and speakers from all skill levels. If you are interested in presenting at Drupal NYC please message Ben Jeavons, our Speaker Organizer, @ https://www.meetup.com/drupalnyc/members/6722489