what’s up with the “losing your hair” theme?
the theme also of “playing together”
graph of technology adoption.
“the enterprise” – long terms, have tech staff, have existing tech that they’re committed to keeping. risk-averse. concerned with downtime, bugs, security. and all the enterprise sites he just showed are all drupal.
case study, but can’t tell some specifics…including the name of the company. 22 content types, 16 modules, etc., etc. (we have 29 content types, altho a couple aren’t actually used.)
have a plan! (imagine that.) views, blocks, menus, etc. – being consistent with what to use where. pick naming conventions, do it consistently. (damn straight.) export as much as possible – features, core exportables. config in code, which gets into maintainability. have to use version control. hudson/selenium (testing tools? lost track for a sec) aegir, drush. need to figure out drush.
“make the robots do the f’ng work” using code instead of ui.
scaling. no longer a crazy unknown thing.
project mgmt, biggest challenge.
able to fund drupal improvements via enterprise client. panels inplace editor. interesting. hmmmm. (actually, that’s EXACTLY what C has been talking about wanting to do with a site.)
hurdles: sales, and interestingly acquia is helping with this because they have a sales staff; scope creep, esp because may not know what’s easy & what’s hard; multiple stakeholders, don’t know who’s the boss, dealing with issues that have nothing to do with you/the project. Platform requirements, moving outside your comfort zone, esp mentions MS issues. “The Pager” – uptime requirements, someone avail as emergency contact.
“this is already a big thing for them” minimize other newness.
human challenges > technical challenges. (all problems are social.)
tool: hudson, automated testing (java), selenium for browsing testing, coder.module. (also goes with one of my other pet theories: let the computers do the part they’re good at.)
aegirproject.org – automated building.
his new thing: pantheon, platform, high performance, best practice git – “trying to build the robots” http://getpantheon.com/ (I’m wondering if I should use something like this or Drupal Gardens to build out my test intranet. Way easier than what I’ve been trying to do!)
I think I have a blog post in me about this stuff, being in a (smallish) enterprise.
warning about only talking to the people that you know “uid ain’t nothin’ but a number” – most intelligent creative people may have just walked into the room; continue to be welcoming.
bring our ideals into the enterprise.
oh, or I might do a post about a year with Drupal. (not unlike my “year with Xtracycle” post!)
Q&A
“going to agile is as big a change as going with drupal” – “do one new thing at a time on a project” – but doing agile (or whatever) internally, with him as the interface with the customer in their process.