One of the great things happening this year at DrupalCon North America — Moscone Center, San Francisco, April 19th - 21st; sign up now — is the community is organizing to offer a number of focused trainings in advance of the conference itself. For those looking to build their Drupal skills and come away with practical knowledge, the pre-conference training sessions offer solid takeaways on a number of subjects.
This is a great time to be training. As our fearless leader Dries has said, the need to develop more talent is more pressing now than ever. It reminds me of the early days of the Drupal Dojo: more ninjas please! Lullabot has clearly been setting the pace here for years, but with Drupal continuing to grow there's simply more demand out there than any one shop can satisfy. Chapter Three has been taking up that challenge by offering regular training events in San Francisco, which has been a good experience for us and our students so far. It's exciting to see others following suit, like our good friends at Zivtech.
Anyway, I'm particularly proud to be helping to organize a session on Drupal performance and scalability. This is a hot topic that I'm happy to see demystified. The more people we can get up to speed on core best-practices, the better we'll be able to drive the next round of Drupal growth, which is going to include a lot of Enterprise-scale projects with intense uptime, scalability and performance requirements.
It's also something people seem to be hungry for; after all, everyone wants their internet to be fast. Last Friday at the Silicon Valley Drupal Users Group I gave a presentation on Drupal in the Cloud, and spent almost two hours doing Q&A about Cloud hosting in general, but really about performance and scalability in particular. It's not a simple thing, but the good news is that with the amount of information-sharing that goes on in the Drupal universe (e.g. via the high performance group), over the past few years some real best-practices are emerging.
If spending a whole day talking to the likes of myself, David Strauss, Matt Westgate, and other luminaries about these issues sounds exciting, sign up now. Space is limited, and I'm pretty sure this one will sell out quick!
