Luke McCormick
Solutions Architect at Simplify Drupal
Luke McCormick has been building websites since 1993, starting as the first Webmaster for Cisco Systems' intranet. He has been deeply involved in the Drupal community since 2009, including starting the East Bay Drupal User's Group and helping to organize several DrupalCons and numerous Drupal camps, including the last ten or so BADCamps. He has worked on numerous large and complex Drupal projects, including government sites like sec.gov and doi.gov. Luke has held roles at Accenture, Acquia, and Cisco, Apple, and numerous other companies large and small, in both technical and management-focused roles.
Luke earned a bachelor's degree in computer science engineering from Columbia University back when computers lived in their own air-conditioned rooms, and more recently a masters in business administration from UC Davis.
Drupal seems easy at first. With just a few clicks you can create very powerful sites incredibly quickly, using built-in facilities like content types, taxonomies, and views. Out of the box, it supports multiple users, multiple languages, mobile devices, and is even SEO-friendly. You can add even more functionality with a handful of contributed modules, change the look of your site by simply installing a new theme, and easily publish your site for all the world to see.
When you try to move beyond a simple prototype, however, you find that things quickly get much more complicated. Actually launching even a simple site requires a substantial amount of customization, and success requires mastery of a surprising number of technologies, APIs, and Drupal-specific idioms. Even hiring expert Drupal talent doesn't get you out of the woods -- you'll end up with a ton of custom code which you will need to maintain and upgrade every time there's a new version of Drupal.
Does it have to be this way? I believe it doesn’t. In this talk, I’ll share strategies for simplifying Drupal development. We'll explore ways to use fewer moving parts, reduce complexity, and achieve better separation of concerns, allowing you to get a beautiful and functional site online without needing to become an expert in every web technology. I'll show techniques that somebody who isn't themself an expert Drupal programmer can use to hire and manage Drupal resources in a way that will leave them comfortably in control of their site.
This will be an interactive session where I'll present some of my ideas, and we'll discuss practical ways to simplify Drupal projects. Bring your ideas, your experiences, and your challenges. Together we'll find ways to make Drupal easier for everyone.