 All right, so before we begin usually we take a survey of who's in the audience Any pms or qa's around No, oh one qa nice business owners managers anything else like that That guy's interesting. Yeah, okay, and Everyone else is a developer Sis admin. Oh Dba Interesting. So which part of the Well I'm gonna let me just make some changes here. You know, the sis admins are gonna be So I guess let's see here. Ah Okay, perfect. Well, there you go Usually I try hope for a business owner or a manager, but none today So, well, we're gonna begin at 345 My name is Tamani Tundewani. I am a customer support manager over at Pantheon This often brings up the question. What exactly is that? That is Someone who helps people get their sites onto the platform in this case Pantheon build them launch them run them and then have them deployed on our on our on our highly scalable matrix of containers now during the course of The the development of the support team We started launching really big sites and we started working with really really really good developers So like the the top shops and the top sites sites that we're getting hundreds of millions of hits per day But the truth is It seems like a mystery when you're building small Drupal sites how you get to that level and it's really not that hard it is a matter of just following some set practices sticking to them and Keeping getting a good understanding of what your application is and how it works so basically what we had done is we put all of the our processes and techniques into a presentation and It seemed to work really well. So here we are today We Are here because I'm sure everyone at some point has seen something like this like your client has said to you My site is slow Your co-worker has been doing something and said my site is slow But for me, this poses a couple of problems one, this is a statement and not a question because it ends in a period and two It's very ambiguous Slow as a general term Someone could call you up. I could call you up and say hey. I try to go to your website. It's slow. Well, why is it slow? I'm going over conference Wi-Fi. I'm tethering over my 3g I'm behind a firewall that's blocking some assets on the page It's such an ambiguous statement that it doesn't help actually get the problem solved now The next problem comes in is when the developers don't understand the site or the application and they are Acting on little to no information so Every time that someone says that my site is slow my immediate response is Is oh my god why like why don't you tell me what is slow? How it's low where it's low when it's low we need the steps to replicate what is slow And what we've found is that even when we work with our enterprise users when they're having issues of any type The detailed information that they give us makes their tickets close faster than anyone else It's not because that they have a higher SLA It's because the detail that they provide allows us to execute and respond faster Now before you do anything before you talk to your client before you start getting into the email threads that go back and forth with 30 people and people are now screaming You really need to understand the problem What are you trying to solve? Today we're going to cover this and we're also going to cover Correlation between configuration and performance Which metrics should we collect? Defining what those are correlating engineering efforts to business metrics And we also have prevent present metrics in a manner that stakeholders can understand and also provide traceable historic data for benchmarks, so You can't say something is slow slower than what is it faster than it was before is it slower by a millisecond? What are you measuring? So let's take a quick look at what this entails So in terms of answering what is this question of what problem are you trying to solve? Well, first we need to understand the people who are involved in this process The people are going to be contributing and actually giving you input on the speed of your site And that is a number of people to be honest if you are a business or an organization Whether university or nonprofit what you'll find is that you'll have a number of contributors Like if I was a working for a business owner whose job was sales He cares about the bottom dollar so slow may not matter to him today Slow matter to him in 30 days when he doesn't get what he's expecting in revenue You know the project managers they need to also understand that they need to follow best practice practices They need a guy there develop developers the right way You know and also keep track of what's going on if you're the developer The best practices should be like the back of your hand You should understand when someone is complaining about something what it is and potential places that you can make enhancements to reduce this pain It may sound strange, but marketing is also included into this The business owners cares about his money The marketing campaigns help generate this by generating ads and other you know click-throughs and things like that So it is important to also get input from them what they're expecting You'll find out that marketing would like to put 500 ads on a page which also makes things slow so Sometimes you need to have a trade-off and a balance and that's something that you have to do as a team Rather than having the developers advocate anything So when it comes to project management, we always look at the the triangle You know and they say you can't have two or you can't have three, but you have two In our belief you can have three and it's all a matter of process You know projects needed to be on time There are deadlines that are sets and these deadlines are tied to all of the stakeholders involved So being on time is critical Some of these sites have fixed deadlines and they can't move their launches They're set for independence day and things like that. So the day tomorrow won't work. They needed to work today So some of those requirements are really tough But the reality is if you're on these teams you have a say if it's not time to go It is better for you not to let things happen Then to let them happen and die and fail failure is the worst thing that you're gonna have because the taste never leaves anyone's mouth Cost You need to have an understanding of what this is gonna cost you the business owner may want to have a million and 200 sales in a day It's just not cost-efficient. You can scale that many servers. You don't have access to those resources You need to temper those expectations and scope This is again working with the marketing sales and all these other departments to get a good plan for scope So that you don't creep over and don't miss your deadlines scope creep is definitely one of the main reasons for people missing their deadlines whenever we see it You know, we have a number of tools and systems that we use for workflow and We really we really must emphasize that repeatable task that you can then delegate to people in a really sane and Coherent manner is important forget email anyone still coordinating projects through email is in for trouble. So avoid that we use Right to manage our projects. We use JIRA for other projects and we also You know integrate we use Trello for different things as well people use red mine There are other ones that exist pivotal tracker and so on We have regular meetings Never do we go more than three business days without talking to someone about something So sometimes we'll get on a call and it'll be five minutes and they'll study is nothing You should never let things get to a point That a problem is now a problem You should catch it at its early stages and that way it'll allow you to be nimble and adjust accordingly The longer things go the harder they are to fix and the more trouble they are and the more they cost You also want to have a really good scheduling system As well as real-time communication The value of face-to-face communication is Beyond words emails may relate the same content, but even looking through at someone Via the web conference is the difference. It'll allow them to get peace of mind They understand that they're talking to a person and you're not just some machine that is auto responding We also encourage training. I shouldn't skip over that training. It's extremely important documentation I Worked at deaf shops. I've worked at organizations I aware we built large sites for media properties and movie studios and very rarely anything was documented and it was a nightmare, so Get good documentation so that when new people start they can onboard faster in the process of Launching sites does not become so cumbersome, but it's easier to deal with Now that you have this team You want to delegate responsibilities? Everyone should know what they're doing and when and how they should respond in various situations The next one for me is extremely important and this is defining emergency procedures I would say about 99% of the sites that launch or maybe 98th do not have any emergency procedures in place So we're talking about backups. What happens if your site goes down? How frequently are you backing up? What type of data do you have? Defining how your business owner responds sending in all caps email to everyone in the company is recipe for disaster And then it just spirals, you know marketing starts complaining the sys admins are not happy the DBA saying what's going on? Marketing is saying our campaign is toast people are crying and it's just the worst so be proactive and stay in touch with that And here's where the meat of this is if you are a developer and you want to improve how your general Process and workflow is follow best practices We're going to cover just the high-level ones and then I'm going to hand off to Christophe and he's going to talk a bit more of an example of these in practice, but configuration We're going to look at best practices. We're talking about fixing your 404 errors. I have seen sites go from You know 15 seconds response time because of three 404s on external services to fixing them and going to sub one second And you think this is a small difference. That was about 15 seconds or so. We'll actually take a look at what some Fractions of a second results in terms of what your results are for your company in your business Block caching a must Drupal is a very advanced system and it is complex Leverage caching wherever possible. We are not going to go into detail any of these We're just going to breeze over them for now. The other presentation does that but not this one Aggregate your CSS and JavaScripts Google web developers Yahoo They have a set of best practices they recommend one of which is reducing the overall aggregate size and aggregating CSS is a really good idea similar to real life The heavier your page the harder it is for the clients or the browser to render it So if I handed you a 60 ton weight and asked you to carry it You'd have a different time if I handed you a feather So make things as light as possible. They allow you to be as responsive as possible Database make sure you have the correct storage engine if anyone has my isam Be sure you actually need my isam and well, you know what it needs to do if you don't you know DB is the default You should stick with it memory caching is a big one Drupal is really It allows the flexibility to cash on and off between Between the database and other areas if you start to see cash tables dominating your Your new red traces then you probably want to look at in memory caching Redis memcache and others disabled unused modules In this instance usually would look at statistics and all of the other modules that people use Statistics generates a query on every page load that means a database transaction That means if someone wanted to purchase something they can't because now you're logging statistics Which you'll never look at the tracker module is similar color box load some JavaScript files And if you're not using it, it's just a waste of time So disabled unused modules again, we've seen remarkable increases in speeds just from this alone It's because sometimes these modules calls errors, which calls rendering problems We also have caching on the front end This will most probably be the difference once you have maxed out your Drupal configuration the biggest bang for buck There is a graph where we show a site going from 10 requests per minute to about 500 requests per minute After we turn on varnish, so you can see that's a big jump in traffic number of orders of magnitude What to expect during and after? Benchmark and benchmark off it. We're gonna see the value of this very soon It doesn't matter. Don't look at any complex systems The initial grasp that we did for this in hand to our clients are in spreadsheets I can gladly share the spreadsheets and how we track configuration and changes over time and Everyone should definitely do that you also as I said be reasonable so you can manage those expectations and Let numbers dictate what you're doing and not just what you feel Google analytics will help you drill down into this And you can kind of calculate your concurrent usage from your analytics Again the full slides which will post will have that and how you there's a formula you can use I you can take the number of visitors that you get the Actual visits that includes you know more than the same user clicking on five six seven pages You'll then use the actual duration of the time that they are on site Something people don't think about is a think time No one browsers a site and clicks really rapidly you want to have these daggers so that they actually mimic the think time of your users Define your environment configuration as things change as you make changes in enhancements You want to know when you change something what is the effect if you change the PHP version What happens if you change the APC shim size? What's going on if you have extensions going on are they contributing to it? How big is your in-memory cache size and your general memory? What is that footprint? Next you should also have a strategy to test and as I said We're going to look a bit about that and just simple spreadsheets can get you part of the way And there's a lot to do to get you the full way Next the question is what metrics should be collects and usually this is why I like the business owners because We rattle these off and they have no idea what they mean and then at the end they start to make sense So for example, we recommend if you're debugging your application split it into back-end and front-end metrics They are very distinct their traits are just distinct and different and that the steps You'll take to debug and diagnose and fix problems are definitely not the same so separate them Maybe I'll do something later if people want to do something with New Relic and actually look at how to analyze that We can actually do that But look at requests per second basically how much traffic can you handle in a in a second? the average of response time The browser load time the total number of requests over the duration of the test whatever it may be the data received The size the overall weight of the page and most importantly the errors the error rate can kill you and you'll soon see why Front-end metrics you should check the load time. This is the time that takes a page to appear the first bytes When there's a communication from the client to the server How long does it take to go from me to you and back to me again? This is different than the time that it starts to render because your JavaScript may be writing it to the DOM and breaking everything Or delaying the rights to the page or the client Reduce the number of DOM elements. You don't need 500 ads. They will kill you as I said fully loaded time and the fully loaded number of requests and I will end here and just so you guys can see Prior to implementing any of this when we used to have enterprise users as you can see the The red line is kind of jagged it keeps on going up It's around four or five tickets that we used to get on average per day Now when we front load things and and do things the right way from the beginning This is the initial process of finding out what those problems are and then the blue line as you see Tapers off until we basically never hear from them again, and they launch more sites And that's the ultimate goal that you guys get to the point that you're doing this But it does require following some best practices Next I am going to give it over to Christoph who's going to give us a real-world example As a partner of what this looks like and the end results All right. Thank you so the point I want to make is that You ought to look not just at your Metrics, you know, how well your web server works and how well your Drupal site works But also what it is supposed to do and whether it's actually meeting the goal that you set for yourself Why use while you develop the website? So in my business in my company We serve our bads for the most part On our pages and together with the information and that is the income for us as a business So for us at click-through as the business metric that we look at most Because that basically defines Whether we generate income from our sites and whether it's a bit warrants investing into the sites so here's a Example of a site that we had a chance to rebuild the on the left you have the Drupal 6 version that was built badly and On the right is the Drupal 7 version same look and feel overall, but while we rebuilt it We took advantage of redoing the theme entirely In the old version it took 1.6 seconds until a user saw something on the page In the new version it takes 0.9 seconds until you see something and the page is visually complete at 1.2 seconds After that a few more things happen that are actually invisible some JavaScript loads We do the Google analytics and all that crud that really doesn't matter to your site visitor That made an enormous difference so And then you also need to go back and talk with your stakeholders, especially the business owners with the marketing folks and Make that case of you know Why are we doing this? What does it give us and you have to present it to them in some really meaningful way? so this is a relatively hard graph But once once you look at it closer, it's much more clear The on the far left the blue line is our new site So once you sort of start to get to the point three seconds timeline Pretty much all of the page comes in and then the JavaScript gets interpreted and by the time you're at It actually shifted at the time we launched. We had to do a bit more work on this But let's just say it this line is pretty much at 0.9 seconds these days At that point you get all on the page that you need and the page is more or less rendered So yet it's front loaded if you will Whereas on the old site that happened much later That's the second blue line and you only got about half and then the rest trickles in slowly Which means your visitors don't get to see as much early on as they should and you You lose their engagement and at the end of the day you lose The actual action you want from them which in our case is an ad click it for you It may be getting more readers may having them read to the bottom or click on an offer or whatever the case may be right so And what's also important is that you keep tracking this stuff over time so that you know which changes made a real impact to the site And you sort of get a picture. So here is a spreadsheet that I maintain for this particular site, and I went way back so that I get some historical Some historical data, but what I want you to focus on is the time frame from last summer 07 2013 up until now So the old version was in action all the way up to In blue are the actual Ad clicks in red is to click through rate which on the old version of the site was right around 1.2 percent and Then jumped up to about two and a half or thereabouts percent in Orange is the actual income that the site generates every month So what we did with the theme layer is we reduced the number of ads shown to half Which actually reduces the number of elements in on our page and and then it gives a bit more space to the actual content But because the site is faster We have this jump in ad click-through rate It basically doubled which means with half the ads we're making the same income and What also happens is you see that the income actually starts creeping up in the new version of our site There's two reasons for that one is that we can sell the ads for higher prices number two Because of the better user engagement. It's not just a click-through rate But they're actually clicking more on the targets that we would really like them to click so for us as a business by Reengineering the site we've actually made it perform better for the user But we've made it also perform better for ourselves as a business both right so it's sort of a win-win situation It really made our marketing folks very happy so But the important thing here is Engineering at a very fundamental level has a very direct influence on a company bottom line or on the success of your block site or whatever Your metric of success is and I think that's the important take-home message You're trying to get the engineering perfect is not existing in a vacuum It exists in the context of a bigger environment whether that's business oriented or doing good out in the world But your site being fast and cool and great is Serving that bigger purpose and if you engineer it right it will serve that purpose better as well So back to you Thank you very much Christoph so Earlier we talked about sites that were you know even at five seconds Even at three and a half seconds what the difference is They basically doubled just in point oh three so That's the end for now definitely open to questions Either me or Christoph if you are if you have any anything about their experience doing this But again all they were doing was just following the Outline best practices and it ended up paying off. So thank you very much We have to give credit to Christoph and I here is his information if anyone wants to talk to him Here is his user ID on the board org his user number ID and as well as his information And you can find him a LinkedIn Christoph Weber and then we also Confined us at Pantheon at get Pantheon or you can find us on free node Or online again Pantheon There are a couple of versions of these slides. We'll post these but you can click on this link It'll take you to the ones that are on slide share Which are a bit more snazzy and got more fancy graphs and that's it So We have about five minutes for questions anyone have any Yes, so there are a couple of versions and I'll see if I can get some notes up So this version will be on the dribble org Austin website You can click on the link at the end that'll take you to the slideshow version There's also the other version when we go more in depth into like configuration And we have some graphs and metrics similar to Christoph's that actually we you can take to the business owner and say configuration change a versus B result in why we need more resources for you know Z and That way you don't just walk in there and say we need more money and they say well, we need more money too, so you know Sometimes how it goes Anyone else with any questions The response time on the page was about six to seven seconds We did a lot of performance tuning added caching. I did some load testing J meter All that kind of stuff and brought it down to within two seconds There isn't really a very easy way of Justifying the effort that was spent in getting to that point now We know that the customers give us good feedback, but there is no hard ROI That we can compute besides looking at our past experience and what's happening now, right? There's data out there actually if you look at Stephen Souter's talks. He's the performance guy at Google That he differ he defined an ID an LD 50 which means LD 50 is a term from toxicology Which means when you give that dose of a toxin to a lab rat 50% of the population will die So in in web performance Terms this means if your page loads During X seconds 50% of your visitors will fall off Right and they will basically stop at that page and abandon and they will not go any further Or maybe not even look at the first page And that's basically if you look at Google and ill analytics that's that's your bounce rate, right? So your LD 50 on a web page in 2011 was four and a half seconds Meaning if your site takes four and a half seconds or longer to deliver a page Especially the crucial pages that you're interested in in 2011 you lost half of your audience already now It's 2014. I'm willing to bet that we're let somewhere around three and a half seconds or lower And yeah in my company We have a hard and fast rule and that was at a basically issued by the CEO not by myself who heads up that Tech team that no site will launch if crucial pages are more than two seconds to load So there's data out there that shows what these trends are and how they've evolved over time But maybe you can come up with a metric that defines success for yourself You know whether that's number of page views or anything else and you can track that over time, okay? So that's actually like like he was saying that's actually a good point You have to define the metrics and what those are going to be right so Why did you? Why did you actually start fixing the sites who asked for that? So I Like I said earlier, I'm really a DBA Yeah, and I have experience in the past with working on load testing and stuff like that So I just happened to nobody really was asking for it. I wanted to do it. Okay. Yeah I mean in a case like that I think it's one of those things where if you if you track what it was before like like we have the Tracking at was low and then you you find out what marketing wants from the side or the company is looking to get from the site And then you track those metrics like in their case It was the clip through rate and the revenue that they're getting from ads I guess you'd have to quantify it for your case And it's the type of thing that if it was the bounce rate affecting some sort of sales or conversions Then if you track those over time from when it was low or higher and what it is now Then that's what you present So I guess the next time you do it you can gather the stakeholders or anything out anyone else figure out what they want Then you say I gave you what you want and if there's other things that you need to make things better They will then be able to provide it for you like the graphs over here are really compelling and like the business owner may not know What requests per second are but he knows what money is and he knows what doubling his money is and so he'll care Okay, so thank you. Thank you for really It all comes down that you as a whole team define what is success for us which numbers define our success You really have to boil it down to Two or three numbers and those need to be tracked at the same time as you're tracking your performance And then you plot them on the same graph and then you're basically home-free because then you can say oh We did X and look what happened for the other metric it went up or it went down and oops, you know We have a regression. We need to fix it Well, I think that's time we're at 30 minutes exactly How's everyone doing Excellent Feel like I should be speeding up my website right now. I'm not giving this talk Let us get started. My name is Andrew Wilson I am the senior account manager at Drupalize me If you don't know Drupalize me, we are the leader in online training in the Drupal space our parent company is Lullabot and Lullabot is One of the top agencies here in the Drupal space. We are both located downstairs on The trade show floor come say hello. I've been told I'm not supposed to sell anything during this session though so that's it for The business side as the senior account manager at Drupalize me. I spend my time heading up sales and marketing Which means I spend a lot of time thinking about strategy and that leads us to my presentation today about vocational education professional certificates and Drupal Let's get started Today's agenda. What am I going to talk about? I'm going to give a really brief introduction of vocational education What it's all about the past and the future what it looks like today professional certificates and what those are Drupal certification, which is very new and Draw some quick conclusions So first off vocational education The OECD in 2010 defined it as what you see up here education designed for and typically leading to a Particular job or type of job it normally involves practical training as well as the learning of relevant theory It is distinct from academic education Vocational education is known by a few different names there is Technical and vocational Education career and technical education which is actually the official name right now Defined by the OECD. Whatever you want to call it It is education for your career It is specific to things that you'll be doing on the job and it started at least in the United States I'm gonna be speaking about the United States primarily this afternoon. It started in the 1860s With the land grant institutions and an act of Congress they created agriculture and manufacturing institutions think of Texas A&M for instance as an example of that all throughout history Whether it's reflected in in what we see today. There's been a dualism in education reform and literature this concepts that connecting academic and career Education together is the best form of education. We haven't really made it that far You can look at Ivy League institutions as an example some of the more elite academic institutions in the United States they stopped after Medicine law Theology and they considered those more learned in terms of career prep and that's what they provide So that's where we are Nevertheless That's not where we're going Globalization is absolutely revolutionizing education For the better I would think but that's I guess opinion and up to everyone here What it's doing is as other countries around the world are able to compete based on wage low wages We are forced OECD countries the first world countries to use That term they need to compete on the quality of goods and services and quality goods and services require Skilled labor and skilled labor ultimately requires higher professional and technical skills, which is something that vocational Education is certainly promoting so that's where we're at and The trend is only going to continue as globalization increases And there's demand in the marketplace for these technical skills. Drupal is a great example there is high demand for talented Drupal developers and That is your crash course in vocational education Congratulations. All right professionals to certificates moving on. They only gave me a half hour here What are professional certificates who has one does anybody have one really nobody Well, let me let me give you an example here Exactly, so let's define it. I Completed some courses in Google Analytics, right? They gave me a completion certificate. Technically, that's a an example of a Not very well-developed professional certificate. It states that I have some degree of competency At least according to that certificate in that particular area the The best way to think of a professional certificate though is it's a form of currency. It's literally Like the dollar that you have in your pocket. You are able to trade that You're able to use it to trade your skills For benefits in the labor market the benefits being jobs so that professional certificate is going to help you out It's not a requirement by any means, but it's definitely something that can prove helpful One of the big characteristics or top characteristics of a professional certificate is The same thing with money Again currency is durability and with dirt with currency that durability is not necessarily, you know The strength of the paper money you can rip it or you can't rip it. It's the trust actually behind it It's the faith. So, you know, if you ask yourself the question, why do I trust this dollar this $5 bill? It's ultimately because people have trust in the government that's behind it some degree of trust and and when that trust Ebs and flows you see the actual value of the currency changing. It's similar to professional certificates Let's take a look at a few examples. I'm looking at non technical examples right now because We look at a lot of tech stuff here There are numerous Certifications out there in the world and one of the things again jumping back to the last slide trust When you're looking at them think to yourself, do I trust this certificate more than another and why is that? Do you trust the Red Cross and and likewise? What does that tell you about the CPR certification that they have or you know if you've bought in engagement ring? You've heard of the GIA Do you have would you have more trust in someone that was GIA certified than someone who wasn't? Just something to think about Professional certificates in IT here are a couple Again, do you trust any of these over? Another if you walked into a store and you needed to have your Apple computer worked on and the person had an Apple certified Or was an Apple certified technician would you trust them more than someone that was not Apple certified? Especially if you're they're working on an Apple product Just think about it Zen is interesting Zen has a PHP developer certification, right? So Zen is a private company Well, it's not as simple as this. They don't they don't own PHP PHP is open source However, they have a certification for PHP sound familiar Yes, no Aquia certification here we are This was announced in on March the 20th of 2014 Everyone's been talking about a Drupal con which is awesome. It's a Certification for Drupal I noted Zend. It's very similar to that right Aquia does not own Drupal Drupal is open source, but there is a certification for Drupal the the Aquia certified developer if you look at the training material it it's specific to Or excuse me the test for the certification specific to Drupal Upon the announcement of the certification program Dries reiterated something Dries by tart the Everyone knows Dries. Do I have to okay great? He reiterated something that he had stated in a blog post from 2009 Where where he said it's my belief that we were best served by allowing many organizations to create their own Drupal certification programs and have the marketplace set their value and I so I told you earlier I like Strategic analysis and all that so I started thinking about this and I was wondering well what What value will the marketplace on a Drupal certification So I went and started to look into a lot of research about it and there there's there's stuff out there not necessarily specific to Professional certificates, but there's a lot concerning education generally and consumer perceptions of Non-profits and for profits generally so there was a big study back in 2010 by the University of Chicago looking at Consumer behavior related to their perception or their stereotypes of a for-profit or a nonprofit it was a really big study The big conclusion that was Identified is that people see nonprofits as being warm What does that mean? If you dig into the details it actually means that there's a good deal of trust that they have for nonprofits over for-profit institutions and and Somehow that they decided warmth was the best adjective there, but trust Underlied much of that. There's also a Google commission a big study about for profits in education and this was really interesting because when they ranked private public community and for-profits for all of these characteristics across the board The ones that ranked lowest again trustworthiness tended to be the for-profit institutions So what does this mean? for the Accuade Drupal certification one it consumers generally trust nonprofits in In the education space consumers generally do not trust for-profits It means that aquia has an uphill battle with these Drupal certifications Again, I stated vocational education is heading in this direction Professional certificates are definitely going to be know the norm here for us whether we like that or not But nevertheless, there's still a an uphill battle ahead of us Ultimately the market's going to place lower value on a certification that has been created by a for-profit versus one that's created by a Non-profit and interestingly enough on some level Dries again understands this he wrote in that same blog post a certification Of course is ultimately only as valuable as the organization standing behind it Which is very true and it's what's seen in and looking in currency and things like that I work with with Dries regularly Tom Ericson Ben Ortega who helped develop this program. I commend them for everything. They've done. They're leading the way in certification in in just Telling the Drupal community that this is something that is needed. They you know, they took the first step So I I truly commend everything that they've been doing But I also believe that research shows that our currency this Drupal certification in the Drupal community needs to be administered run Attached to a nonprofit organization. I would argue that that organization should be the Drupal association But I think that is also up for discussion as well So That's it. What do you think who else has opinions on the matter? There's a microphone right there. I see some hands I love this So where does Microsoft fit into all that? It's a great question. So so Microsoft for those certifications. They're they're certifying people on their proprietary Implementation so they are actually judged as the the best source for that information For their proprietary products, right? They built it. They know it Apple built the software and the hardware. They know it In this instance, it's a little bit fuzzier Right. Does does aquea build Drupal? No, they do a lot. Certainly. They definitely do So are they the best organization have the certification for it? It's a question. So I really have two comments. Please I Had up a team I I'm part of the hiring process I don't make the ultimate decision, but I make a lot of the evaluation So if someone comes to an interview and says I'm certified or I'm not certified quite frankly right now I don't give a damn in fact I think if they're certified they may actually be slower and the guy who comes to me and looks like you or girl Who's really eager and like right in there? I think well, they'll have it in them to really step up to the plate and within three months time I've got the best person And they're probably good from maybe not day one, but let's say day five or so on Whereas I'm not quite sure about the person. It just doggedly pursues the path of I'm getting these Certificates, and I'm putting this next to my name on my business card and who cares, right? So I'm not really a believer in it just yet But I see some value in them, so I'm sort of you know, I'm torn at the moment But I certainly myself. I would never go and earn one. I don't see the value in that for myself at all What you're talking about is It's kind of like the early 2000s when Everybody came out and just started getting certified in it in Microsoft products and Oracle products And and I used to work in a IPM shop and it was you had to get as many certifications as you could And so the value of those certifications kind of weren't as important very much because Everybody who was getting those certifications. So I kind of with you. I At this point in time, I don't know how valuable the certification will be just because of what happened about ten years ago I think Yeah, it's an excellent point a lot of this is obviously based on the notion that the trend is toward Certification and if you look at a lot of research, it seems like that is Where we're headed whether that's in a year or ten years or 25 years or never is a good question Right. Will that ever matter? It's also important to to think outside of the Drupal community and people trying to enter you know, we know that so-and-so worked at Pantheon and knows all about scaling websites and all that but there there are new entrants all the time And we don't necessarily know about them and do professional certificates help us know a little bit more Does that reduce the burden on the? higher in terms of time and money to vet potential new hires I'm glad you mentioned that because that brings me to my second thing If somebody comes to me and to the interview and says so I've been on Drupal I stopped me and I've I've completed these videos because I wanted to know, you know That to me has some value because I know I'm probably not going to have to cover those things with that person Or maybe only slight polish but today pass a test afterwards I really don't care that much but if they tell me and make me believe that they've actually done the stuff that In itself has value and maybe a completion certificate of say your series of videos would have some worth in itself also and Maybe there's a third ways that you can track whether they've had the whole video play or just you know started watching the first two minutes Before you tell yeah that person has watched it whether they really looked at the screen That's a whole nother wall game. They did or not if somebody tells me I did it and then comes back and has no clue I mean there's a third. There's a 90-day period during which we fire, right? Thank you very comments Are you guys planning on offering certification? Thank you for asking that at this point in time. I can't well I can't speak for the team at this point in time. There's no there's nothing in the plans In terms of what we do in the future. I I don't know sir Excuse me completion certificates certainly seem like the easy first step, but it's an excellent question Do you envision anyone else and I Guess I'm not fully aware of your competitors, but as far as I know Aqua is the only one that's offering anything Drupal certification related right now, right? No, who else does? OS who OS training OS offers a certification is that I was unfamiliar with that, but it sounds curious Clues completion certificate. Okay, cool. Thanks. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, and again back to Dris's comment about it. He's certainly hoping that others do create Certifications of some sort and then the market will set their value Hi, I'm Gwendolyn Annella with Drupal easy and we run career training programs for Drupal and actually have Started the program down in Florida to help unemployed space center workers after they cancelled the shuttle program and I I am I work a lot in the Workforce world and in the education world and I realize within the Drupal community. There's a lot of controversy over this But from outside the Drupal community, I can't tell you like how helpful it would be to have certification Whenever I make presentations to people in the education world in the government world It takes me like three quarters of my presentation before I can even start talking about Drupal because I have to start explaining what open Sources and why there are no certifications and to answer it like your comment I think it would be best if it was through the Drupal Association But I think because it's such a controversial issue It's good that such a mayor major player in the market has stepped up to do something like this And I also think we need to recognize that this is not a US based Problem that they were solving certifications are much more regard highly regarded I think and you especially in Europe and so I think what they were trying to do is you know If there if there's not this you know mass You know kumbaya over certifications in the community They as an organization stepped up to do it So it would absolutely be best if it was through the Drupal Association I mean if we're gonna have a certification through the Drupal Association, but I don't I don't know if that's possible at this point Thank you I'm kind of a unique beast that you know the people we serve are a k-12 community Okay, I deal with vocational schools I deal with schools and a lot of those schools have some sort of web development classes that they they have in their curriculum Especially the vocational schools. I mean we've got Cisco training that we also have this other But there's really no certification for the web development people so there you know to look at your portfolio or my Portfolio, I think it speaks for itself those who've been doing this for six eight years Yeah, this is the collection of my work, but for those who are coming into My understanding is that aqueous also going they're developing a massive online open curriculum as well and That might be something as far as you know for us to go in there and say no no no I took the test big deal, but for somebody to Who knows a little bit about the web and HTML to delve into Drupal for the first time to take an online class like that as Part of a high school vocational program makes sense as far as a first step into it and to have a certification that says I Understand the basics, but beyond that, you know, it's really your resume your your the work speaks for itself I mean you walk in and you can either do it or you can't and I when you hire people a Lot of its attitude and what they're capable of learning on their own all of us I think are self-directed learners we sit down and we learn because we like to and those who show up with 10 certificates and say I know everything there is to know I'd say well, let's find out But sure for what it's worth. I think there is a need for this especially to get a lot of new blood into the community and Maybe the K-12 market and the vocational education market might be a good fit for Thank you very much Kind of adding to what he was talking about earlier with portfolios and certifications, I was wondering in in your own research if you've seen any correlation or relationships with regard to quality of Portfolio and quality of like certifications Like I'm just kind of curious also just from this crowd, you know, if you were to choose between two developers Would you choose someone? You know with a better portfolio or a better set of certifications Yeah, it's an excellent question. Actually a lot of the literature is Focused on that, you know, what can a professional certificate of any type actually tell us? Can it tell us that this person is an expert? No, it cannot Ultimately, that's a matter of their work experience their resume what they've done, you know, what they can show What it can say is that they're at or they should know at least This amount of information whether that means they can apply it well or they can think critically You know And it should not necessarily as a result ever be needed to replace things like work experience But it can be used in combination with that to get a foothold of some sort Hi, I just I actually have two points. I wanted to say one was more of a statement, which is I think couple of you commented about whether or not the Drupal Association should be a source of certifications, and I think that that is It seems like an intuitive natural place to put that but at the same point, it's completely wrong Because the Drupal Association is meant to actually be there to support the entire Drupal community And by putting the Drupal Association in a place where it is certifying people You're actually having the Drupal Association say who's a good person and who's a bad person and making a judgment call on people And that's in my opinion really destructive in their role to support the entire community I thank you. I appreciate the the comment because it's The discussion is important. I think and and I don't necessarily believe And I hope it doesn't come across like this that Akira was wrong in creating their certification I think I don't I don't think I think they did a really great job and maybe there's a role For partnering or something like that or a different thing that I'm not even considering right now, right? So I appreciate that. Thank you. So that kind of leads into my next thing and I apologize I was a bit late to this I'm kind of curious to hear any comments that you guys that you have on something like certified to rock or Some sort of data-driven metrics around those kind of things I Would actually push that back to to everyone else. I I haven't studied a certified to rock based on someone's skills enough to comment on so I'd rather not Does anyone it would okay, so certified to rock is a System basically that analyzes all of your triple.org data from your profile your commits your Form posts those kind of things and there's Yeah, I should it's it's a hidden metric so The algorithm of what all of that data turns into is not necessarily known But the idea is that then based off of that data You can then kind of give people a bit of a score about Their involvement in the community and and to some extent use as a metric as in terms of their experience and knowledge level But Yeah, I guess it maybe I can get you to comment in a more general sense about the idea of using Data-driven metrics to actually evaluate people maybe not necessarily specifically certified to rock And I should probably clarify I'm actually in the process of reworking certified to rock so that's why I'm also really curious I need ideas people have on this concept Interesting. Yeah, I am a huge data guy. I mean I when I'm looking at certification what the market's going to think about The awkward certification. I look to the research. I look to what the data shows And I think ultimately it goes back to the marketplace setting the value on certified to rock and Is that value higher or lower than a different type of certification? But sort of the badge concept is really intriguing to me as a you know They've they have this certified to rock badge that means something right and let the market determine what that means Sort of hogging the microphone here I wanted to go back to a couple of issues that the guy who just left raised is You know, that's not fair Our institutions prepping the people right I recently had an open front-end developer and the designer position open and Some of the applicants came in through the art Institute those guys really trained their people to Work on their resumes get their personal brand out there Actually, I'm carrying a pen that I received from a candidate during the interview in in my bag so, you know looking at this polished resume and sort of maybe the Folio was minimal but the resume was top-notch and that gets them a foot in the door very clearly whereas the sort of mediocre resume Where did these poor suckers haven't been trained as well? It really makes a difference what an institution does and how well they empower their Graduates to you know to sort of make that first step in into the market Losing my train of thought here. I was going to address something that that also came up But anyway, so what I wanted to say is I think vocational training and academic training can go More that can prepare people in different ways and can empower them more or less Depending on what an institution really does and I've seen some really top-notch examples where the kids came out really well equipped Definitely definitely. Yeah. Oh the second thing I wanted to do You know if say if this room or a pool of applicants to me if you stepped up to the microphone today You have one and a half shoes in my door and the ones that didn't step up to the microphone would have to fight harder Okay, so it's like it's the attitude thing. Okay me And you can't necessarily Certify that Go ahead, please So I came to the web development community after college I got a degree in psychology and really has not much to do with web development but I got up to speed a little bit extra with online learning with Coursera and Codecademy and they do give you some kind of like badges, but for me I think they're more like social media than something I would actually put on my resume or LinkedIn profile But I don't know if that's something, you know people are doing these days or if that's something I should be doing Or where that will go ahead or even yeah, just if that's even respected sure The neat thing is that it right now is the forefront for this I mean, this is where these conversations are happening Around certification and badges and things like that. What is going to be effective in in the near future? I'll just kind of comment from my perspective on that first on the idea of badges and using something like the Khan Academy Things and I think that would be that you should never rely on those things at least at this point to be your resume or to be a Qualification in the same way that you would with a degree But you really shouldn't hesitate to put that down either on your resume or on LinkedIn or whatever else because it's just It can't hurt. It's always one additional point towards you to say I'm doing more. I'm you know, this is something else. I have accomplished. This is something else. I've done and Particularly for a developer perspective a lot of people will look at stuff on github for example and not having like deciding it's kind of like the equivalent of saying well, I'm not going to post on github because You know, I don't think that that's relevant or whatever else and it's it's still it's still a Product of your work that somebody will evaluate So that's just my perspective Excellent. Thank you very much. We are out of time But if you would like to continue chatting about this, there's a lot of conversations going on at Drupal con I'm downstairs on the trade floor. They locked me down there for the rest of the conference So come say hello and we can chat some more. Thank you very much