QED42 Reimagine

A brief about the discussions during the monthly Pune Drupal Group Meetup.

The monthly Meetup for March was hosted by Rotary International and a session on, Services and dependency injections in Drupal 8"."

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Great Minds at Trek - QEDians on the way to Lohagad Fort.

Who says you cant mix business with pleasure? We trekked, we saw, we conquered.

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Someone has rightly said "Trekking is a great pleasure and an exercise" and this pleasure is twofold when you are with your friends from work. In an informal setting like this you discover the adventurous and fun parts of their personality, which you wouldn't otherwise.

The plan to trek to Lohagad was spontaneous, made only the night prior and the meeting point was at Pune Railway Station. Dipen was the first one to reach and it wasn't because he was excited about the trip but rather the cab driver had arrived a bit too early. Slowly but surely our small team of trekkers gathered and we began the journey full of energy and excitement. We boarded the local train to Malavali and didn't waste a single second to begin having fun. While the train transversed the green landscape of Maharastra we gossiped away and took numerous selfies and managed to catch the sun rise which was an event for us since we all wake up really late.

Finally at around 7 am we arrived at Malavali and everyone was hungry especially, Vishal and Sumit.We planned to have a “light” breakfast but ironically it included Dosa, Idli, Uttapam and Tea. So after being sufficiently fed and watered we started moving ahead through villages in the search for Lohagad Fort which was about 4-5 kms away. A fact unknown to Dipen else he would’nt have agreed to walking so long I guess.

The very first real adventure we came across was a waterfall which was small but dangerous and very slippery. One by one all of us climbed on top of the waterfall and got wet, including Swastik who was a little scared of the height. After this pit stop we continued on our trek, the route wasnt very hard but the altitude kept increasing steadily and due to some road construction Ajit and Sumit lead us through a dangerous offroad trek path.

Along the way we had to wait for “20 minutes” for the family of a colleague and we took up this opportunity for a long break and even though it took them way more time than 20 minutes we didnt really mind cause two kids joined our group and the fun just doubled. The scenery was breath-taking and we all utilized our great quality camera phones, but the Indian heritage and scenery is so diverse that the photos dont really do it any justice.

The main entrance to the fort is called "Ganesh Darwaja". The Ancient beauty drew our attention but what kept us even more occupied were the cute kids who joined us mid-way through the trek. Karnika had become their “didi” and was leading them to the top of the fort. As beautiful as the fort was, the height it was built at was dangerous too and we had to be careful. We all broke off into small groups and started exploring and by the time we reached the dangerous end of the fort heavy rains started with loud thunder roaring in the sky. Children were crying out of fear and we were praying to god to help us out today. Those moments were really interesting and scary but after awhile the sky became quiet and we started the journey back down the hills and it was made even more pleasurable as light showers accompanied us. That evening was really very beautiful and finally the journey was complete, full of excitement and adventure and we reached the railway station to go back home.

Lastly thanks to Gandhiji, We QEDians were lucky to spend time with each other not as colleagues, but as friends and even though the trek is over, I still wonder : "Where did the King sleep? As i didn't find any room above the hills..."

QED42 is attending and speaking at Drupalcon New Orleans, 4 of our talks have been selected in various tracks and we are thrilled to meet all the Drupalers. See you there.

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With around 767 submissions from around the globe DrupalCon New Orleans must have set a new record for an all time high for session submissions at any conference. We can only imagine the plight of track chairs who helped select final ~150 sessions, given the numbers we are absolutely thrilled to announce that three of our talks (Including one in higher ed summit) have been accepted for Drupalcon New Orleans.

Here is a brief of talks at Drupalcon New Orleans May, 2016.

Service Workers Internals:

Saket and Piyuesh will talk about Service Workers on D8 and the promise of offline web. The topic is a build up from series of BoF at Drupalcon Asia where service workers was discussed passionately and pragmatically. It’s not just frontend, necessary backend infrastructure (route caching, url config) needs to be present for service workers to be a reality, hence Saket and Piyuesh ( our frontend and backend leads ) decided to team up on this. You can read more about the tentative agenda at the session synopsis and here are rumours of what to expect in the demo:

Config for urls for offline first approach
Config for urls for network first approach & fallback to serviceworker cache
Static resource caching via service workers
Since D8 has placeholders, it would be wise to cache the response of placeholders & render them using service-workers. Background sync can be used to keep pulling in fresh data for the placeholders.

Exploring Drupal 8 Frontend landscape through Polymer :

Saket is back with a session on the utopia of using Drupal 8 as a backend for multiple front end frameworks; this time it’s through Polymer. Webcomponents have had the frontend community wanting, what’s not to desire? Reusable components, shadow DOM, templating and much more all native to the browser. Though webcomponents paints a beautiful feature, Polymer from Google delivers it as a polyfill for the restless. In this talk Saket will talk about what Drupal 8 frontend programming might look like and glitches we might need to resolve for a smooth future.

Higher-ed Summit

Drupal Campus Ambassador Program - A community Initiative:

A wildcard entry into Dries’s keynote and Holly’s closing-note at Drupalcon Asia, DCAP made its humble beginnings in one of India’s regional events, where business folks were trying to find answers to Drupal talent problems. In spirit of Drupal community’s do-ocracy some of the community members figured a WIN-WIN solution for the problem, that is to take Drupal to colleges and evangelise it professionally. There have been numerous college workshops but DCAP is different in ways that it provides longevity and support to college students and that is exactly what Rakhi will be sharing at Higher-ed summit -- a bit of the history, successes so far and brave new world Drupal will foray into through DCAP. Catch Rakhi in action on May 9 at DrupalCon New Orleans.

QED42’s sessions, contributions, and learnings shared at DrupalCon Asia with the global Drupal community.

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Explore Pune's Drupal Global Training Day, where students delved into practical sessions on views, theming, and module development.

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This quarter's Drupal Global Training Day happened on 23rd May 2015. In association with the pune drupal community a two day workshop was conducted in Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies & Research. The workshop was a two days program held on 23rd May 2015 and 24th May 2015 which focused on giving practical sessions on views basics, advanced views, basic Drupal theming and module development. Ajit Shinde and Saheel Sikilkar took the sessions on views along with few team members to mentor the students.

In the session students were made to build there own job portal. Throughout the training practical sessions was focused on along with making flowcharts to make understanding easier.Students were keen to get their doubts cleared, this kept the session interactive.

On the second day training moved to front end on Drupal, The workshop was taken up by Saket Kumar and Swastik Pareek, along with other members of Pune community helping in the lab with student doubts and queries, the workshop focussed on basic front end workflow for Drupal and also delved into custom theme development from scratch.

Students were shown how to design a page using the psd designs and were given task to design their homepage for job portal which they built, the previous day. Basic module development was discussed by Dinu Mishra from the Pune community and went on to cover basic building blocks of a custom module. With that we wrapped up 2 days of engaging workshops with future Drupalers.

Few lines shared by students on the workshop:

""The sessions were quite good enough to let us understand the system from the basics. I learned many new things which I was supposed to learn. Without asking questions to them many of my confusions were cleared. Doing hands on one by one was a good technique rather than explaining everything and then doing hands on, it was a good workshop held by you guys.

-Vicky Thakkar

MSc CA, SICSR ""

""We did not have the clear idea about Drupal earlier, but the session gave us the whole idea about Drupal Development. The team which taught us Drupal was so calm and helpful, that gave a spark of interest in Drupal.

-Dhruvesh D Tripathi

MSc CA, SICSR""

""The Drupal Workshop was an informative session where we could learn about the module and theme development and many other features which Drupal provides. There was a hands on session too that helped us to learn more about Drupal as we could practically see the outcomes.

- Surabhi Gokte

MSc CA, SICSR""

Dive into the discussion at the May meetup as developers and themers collaborate on Drupal issues, code sprints, and networking experiences.

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We are thankful to Clarion Technologies for hosting the Pune Drupal monthly meetup on 29th May 2015 at its premises. The meetup had more than 38 active members participating into it. In this meet up we came up with an open discussion to bring basic solutions to problems faced by the frontend and backend developers. Swastik Pareek initiated the discussion by giving a brief presentation on “Bridging the gap between themer and site builder ”. Some of the things discussed in the presentation :-

Estimating together :- Developer and themer should do estimations in tandem, checking feasibility and being on same page with markup consensus.
Common Mistakes :- The very basic and the most common mistakes done while site building were pointed in this section.
Reusable code :- If different pages have same designs then code should be written such that it could be reused, one should not write too much page specific codes.
Image Management : Discussion on image management and image presets while theming

Followed by the presentation we had a problem solving session in which all the developer discussed about their problem faced in different areas. Following are the area of discussions taken up :-

Saket Kumar talked about the solutions to queries about theme development.false
Ajit Shinde speaking about Development in Drupal8.false
Piyuesh Kumar discussed about the Drupal site performance issues and solutions.false
Ravish Gupta from the pune drupal group talked about multilingual sites and translations.false

After this Piyuesh Kumar shared his cool experience about @DrupalConNAfalse

He talked about the keynote given by Dries Buytaert, prenote. He and Saket Kumar shared their experiences about mentoring the code sprint in @DrupalConNA. He mentioned about Dries Buytaert doing live commit for a patch done by the group in code sprint at @DrupalConNA. In addition he talked about after parties :) and benefits of developer networking. The session was focussed on sharing experience which got many excited for DrupalCons Asia 2016 in Mumbai

Stay connected with us to get updates on Pune Drupal Group.

Recap of QED42’s June Drupal Meetup featuring new learnings, tools, and community insights.

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This month Pune Drupal group had more than 75 active attendees participating in Drupal Monthly Meetup. We are thankful to Cybage Software Pvt Ltd for hosting the event on 26th June 2015 at their premises.

The basic agenda of the meetup was to launch the Pune Drupal Camp 2015 website and present the camp highlights.

Ajit Shinde presented a session on drush which mostly focussed on drush as a deployment and remote management tool in detail. In the presentation he discussed various scenarios of remote server management using Drush and site aliases.

To understand this in more detail you can follow this Blog :- drush as deployment and remote management.

Shubhangi Bandal presented a session on Drupal Distributions. She talked about anatomy of distributions and how to create your own with a discussion on .make files and Installation profiles.

After the sessions we had BoFs(Birds of Feather) where developers came together and discussed their problems in different areas of development. Following are the areas of discussions taken :-

Saket Kumar talked about the solutions to queries about Drupal 8 theme development.

Ajit Shinde spoke about Drupal 8 module development.
Swastik Pareek explained about Drupal 7 Behaviours.

Naveen Valecha stressed on Drupal performance.
Saheel Sikilkar discussed on Drupal to Drupal Migration.

After the BoFs Dipen talked about future of Students in Drupal.

He addressed about Drupal Campus Ambassador Program (DCAP) which aims to introduce Drupal to top Indian Universities and Engineering colleges by creating a network of Drupal Campus Ambassadors across different Universities and Engineering colleges of India. DCAP will be lead by core leadership and volunteers from the Indian Drupal community will travel to these colleges, evangelize Drupal and select one student who has very good insight into Open Source technologies. He mentioned that the idea behind the DCAP is to have these bright minds spreading Drupalism at the grass root level. At the end, community launched Pune Drupal Camp 2015 website and thanked members of the team who worked for the website.