This last Saturday, November 10th, the NUIT A&RT AMPS web development team and four of the NUX student developers (Ethan Romba, Al Johri, Cassie Rommel, and Georgiy Mazin) ventured down to the University of Chicago’s International House for DrupalCamp Chicago 2012. This small professional development conference turned out to be a great learning experience for both the AMPS and NUX team members, who frequently rely on Drupal as both a back end and presentation model to support developments within NUIT.
The conference started out with a bang, as Acquia‘s Manager of Community Affairs, Jeffrey McGuire, delivered a great keynote on The Real Value of Open Source: ROI and Beyond, which touched on the progress open source software has made over the last decade and it’s recent usage and recognition in the software community. Throughout the rest of the day, the team split up to attend sessions on Drupal usage at University of Chicago, automated testing with Drupal, responsive enhancement, web application security and rapid development techniques. By the end of the day, each developer’s had learned techniques to manage their next Drupal project with a more efficient workflow, and build towards a more dynamic product.