In a few hours, I'll be heading to Princeton University for my fourth DrupalCamp New Jersey.

This camp holds a special place in my heart because it was the first place that I spoke about OpenDevShop in public.

DrupalCamp NJ brought me out of my lonely freelancer shell and into the larger Drupal community. 

2013: Beginnings of a Community

For DrupalCamp NJ 2013, we sponsored, and I held two BoFs, on Aegir & DevShop. A very small number of people attended, both of which are now good friends! Back then, I called it "DevShop: the Drupal Environment Manager". It took a long time to figure out how to even describe the thing.

Looking back, it was a critical moment. Getting out there and bragging about my own project was not something I was used to. It was the small beginning of a long tradition of listening to what people thought, keep track of the good but more importantly, the bad things about the product. By listening, we've been able to focus on what matters most for our users.

2014: "Drupal Infrastructure in a Box"

The next year, for DrupalCamp NJ 2014, the organizers were nice enough to accept my session proposal. The room was huge, and I really didn't expect such a large turnout. The feedback this year was incredible.

2015: Turn key Testing

For DrupalCamp 2015, the organizers were gracious enough to select my session again. This time I focused on the new Testing features I added to OpenDevShop. 

It was at this camp that we unveiled the ability of OpenDevShop to run Behat and other tests automatically, every time you push code.  

I was able to demo how a new Pull Request on GitHub can automatically spin up a new environment and test it.

It was such a great session, we got such great feedback, that we devoted all of our efforts into polishing and enhancing the testing. It became really clear at this DrupalCamp NJ that everyone wants to get better at testing.

Our goal with OpenDevShop became to make writing and running tests as easy as possible.

2016?

This year, we won't be holding a session, or a BoF. This year, we will be hunkered down in the Coding Lounge, working hard on upgrading OpenDevShop to be able to host and test Drupal 8. We plan on releasing an Alpha by Sunday.

Mentoring & Collaboration

On Sunday, we are staying all day for the Mentoring & Collaboration day at the FFW offices.

I've been working hard to make OpenDevShop easier to contribute to, and helping others join the community. We are going to be online and working together to improve our own tests, development environments and documentation all weekend long.

Please join us in our chat room at https://gitter.im/opendevshop/devshop and in the issue queue at https://github.com/opendevshop/devshop.

Global Sprint Weekend

This year, the Camp lines up with the Global Sprint Weekend organized by the Drupal Association. People all over the world are coming together in person and online to work together on Drupal and Open Source.

We are doing the same with OpenDevShop. Come online or in person at your local Global Sprint Weekend meetup and we will help get you setup to contribute to development!

This should be an amazing weekend. Drupal and OpenDevShop are hitting some serious momentum with Drupal 8. We're really looking forward to working with our new contributors, and pusing out DevShop 1.0!

For more information about OpenDevShop, visit getdevshop.com.

Tags: devshopDrupalCampNJPlanet Drupal