OSU Open Source Lab

OSL Staff Participate at DrupalCon 2013

Open Source Lab staff members attended DrupalCon May 20-24 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. OSL attendees welcomed the opportunity to contribute and learn during the many sessions and social events.

“It was so good to see everyone in the open source community, meet new people and reconnect with people I only see once a year,” says Rudy Grigar, senior systems architect.

The OSL presented Put the Ops in Dev: What Developers Need to Know about Devops, a session to teach developers what they need to know about operations to improve the maintainability of their code in production. Grigar said that the session was fun to present, because they had good participation.

“We had lots of good questions at the end of the session from the Drupal community,” Grigar says.

Another session presented by the OSL was Empowering K-12 Schools through Drupal and other FOSS Tools. Greg Lund-Chaix, a former OSL developer who was instrumental in the creation of the Oregon Virtual School District, discussed how ORVSD benefits Oregon teachers and school districts. Lund-Chaix explained that ORVSD is a resource teachers can use to supplement their in-class instruction but is not designed to replace classroom teachers or provide high school credit.

“This is a tool to do better, not a tool to do more,” Lund-Chaix says.

In addition, OSL Senior Software Engineer Ken Lett discussed the ways ORVSD is currently being utilized by school districts and fielded audience questions.

In the expo hall, OSL Director Lance Albertson was pleased to see the wide variety of technology companies using Drupal, which has been hosted at the OSL since 2005.

“I thought it was amazing to see the different designs, deployments and unique ways Drupal is being used,” Albertson says.

For example, Videx, an access control and data collection company located in Corvallis, uses Drupal as the basis for their electronic lock systems. The diversity of companies using Drupal demonstrates the popularity of the content management system and its continued growth.

The OSL would like to thank the many Drupalcon event sponsors.