Last month, I had the opportunity to go to a two-day deployment workshop in Indianapolis hosted by SixFeetUp. Eleven people attended the training which, I understand, was about half of what was hoped for. I arrived for the training on a Wednesday afternoon and spent the evening hanging out at SixFeetUp, eating Qdoba and playing Wii. Thursday was a day of presentations from the SixFeetUp staff at the world’s nicest library in Indianapolis. This included the presentations given by Andrew (caching and deployment) and Clayton (buildout) gave at the Plone Conference in DC, along with a presentation on backups given by Shay, a presentation on alternative deployment methods and site troubleshooting given by Calvin and a presentation on deploying to Windows given by special guest speaker Alan Runyan. The second day was a more free-form day addressing specific topics brought up on the previous day.
The size of the training is what provided the real value. It seemed that there were almost as many trainers as trainees. This allowed things to be more flexible even on the first day. There were more oportunities for specific questions during presentations and Calvin was able to include a section on troubleshooting in his presentation which was not originally planned (and also very helpful.)
The workshop covered a lot of topics: squid, pound, nginx, everything you might want to know about buildout (potentially a two-day workshop in itself) including Zopeskel and how to make custom templates, backup methods, backup strategy, load testing with JMeter and Funkload, CMFDeployment, YSlow, Firebug, other debugging tools, and deploying to Windows (which, I’ll admit, I didn’t pay much attention to.) If that seems like a lot, it was. And I probably left a few things off. We were getting the accumulated knowledge of the entire SixFeetUp staff, or very nearly so.
For me, it was good to know before I went what kinds of projects I wanted to undertake after the training. I was looking to implement better caching strategies, create a custom buildout template for ifPeople, and implement a load testing strategy. Having the plan ahead of time helped me to focus on the elements that seemed like they would be most helpful to me. And I did come away with a solid game plan for how to go about my intended tasks.
I’ll post more about my specific deployment-related projects in this space as I work on them. So, stay tuned!
Josh, once again, it was nice meeting you at the workshop. I just wanted to second everything you said about it; except for the Windows part since we are stuck with it. Anyway, anyone interested in running Plone themselves should definitely attend the next one.
What I liked best about the workshop was its small size because we got to interact more with everybody in the group. It would be great to go to more small Plone events like that more often. I went to the workshop with a specific goal in mind and got it met. That wouldn’t always happen at a big event.
That’s a good point Chris. Not only were we benefiting from the collective knowledge of all of SixFeetUp, we were benefiting from the knowledge of all of the attendees too.
For me, it was good to know before I went what kinds of projects I wanted to undertake after the training. I was looking to implement better caching strategies, create a custom buildout template for ifPeople, and implement a load testing strategy.