As part of cultivating a support network on my journey to build GreatAlbum, I've gotten involved with the New England Regional Developers (NERD) group over the past year. I attended NERD Summit 2020, where I got some great insights on a few topics relevant to GreatAlbum.

This year at NERD Summit 2021, while I expect to continue to learn from others, I also wanted to contribute something back to the community, which of course if it stimulates any interaction will also end up generating further insights for my team as well. I'm actually planning to present one session myself, and then have one of my team members co-present a second session, which will then continue into a Birds of a Feather Session on Day 2. Below are the session proposals, in case you're interested. I'll update this post with presentations once they're available. 

Proposed Session #1 - Non-Technical Founder's Approach to Agile Project Mgmt

Are you a non-technical Founder or Project Manager wondering how best to define the requirements and manage the development of a website or app? Attend this session to learn how one such non-technical Founder went about it - mistakes made, lessons learned, approach now being followed. A few highlights of the session:

• Started on Backlog.com - tried to manage requirements & tasks in a simple issue tracker, discovered that didn’t work

• Adopted Atlassian Confluence and Jira for knowledge and project mgmt

• Adopted agile project mgmt, generally as described by Atlassian

• Use Google Sheets to analyze distribution of tasks between team members, components, sprints, etc.

• Key Take-Aways

Proposed Session #2 - Advanced Group & Media Functionality on a Drupal8 site

In this session, we’ll demonstrate how we have utilized advanced capabilities of Groups and Media in Drupal8 to build the GreatAlbum site.

Some key features we’ll review include:

• Sending invites to non-site users via email and having them accept/register

• Making media entities part of group content

• Group view includes a stream of content/media

• Group tabs, so show streams for each content type

• Group Activities document creation and updates of content/media in the group

• Google Photos integration - create media entities in the group based on Google Photo Albums

• Enabling content/media to belong to more than one Group

• View all your content/media across Groups

Features yet to implement

• Open and Public Groups, to go along with the Private Groups initially implemented

• Non Members can request to join a Group and be approved/denied

• Share an Event and all its related content (Stories, Individuals, Place, Media) to another Group in one bulk operation