Ask any educator the best way to teach someone and their first response will be everyone learns differently. It's the greatest challenge yet where the most creative methods are born.

Have you been given a new hire who needs onboarding? Do you want to help teach your co-workers the skills you learned at a camp or DrupalCon? Do you want to help empower your clients to confidently navigate their own site or product? No matter the purpose of teaching, for best results you must determine your student’s style and adapt to their learning needs.

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Volunteer work is exhausting, time consuming, and many times, thankless. So why do we do it?

Sure, many companies encourage it, and some may even pay you for it, but odds are, if you're one of the many volunteers I've worked with over the past 10 years, you do it because you like it. You have a passion for the work, or for the mission, or simply because you like giving back.

Having the best talent on your team can be a lot easier if you’re not limited to a single geographic area.  But despite the reality of modern communications, running a fully distributed company is not without its challenges. 

Fortunately, those challenges all have solutions. Here’s how we’ve grown and continue to build a fully distributed company, and the lessons we’ve learned along the way. This is the story of what worked and what didn’t. 

Non-profit organizations (NPOs) face several organizational, budgetary and technological challenges that are significantly different than most other “normal” businesses. NPOs generally use a plethora of different online tools, some of which are free for non-profits, to collect, nurture and develop donor relationships with their constituent base, which inevitably leads to data sprawl.

Debugging can feel a lot like hunting for a needle in a haystack, and sometimes you're not even sure the needle is there. But we'll walk through a few examples taken from real life, and see how those were found and solved. Along the way we'll look at strategies for narrowing the search, and tools to help with navigating unfamiliar code.

In this session we'll look at what to do when the unexpected happens and you need to debug, especially when it's someone else's code -- either Drupal itself, or a contributed or custom module.

The greatest asset of open source software is the ability to fork and improve. When it comes to our community’s culture, could we be better? I know we can. In fact, there are mathematical algorithms and scientific studies supporting the advantage of diverse teams.

The audience will explore with me these real-world and documented scientific studies while simulatenously relieving the awesomeness of Star Trek: Voyager.

We'll talk about:

Build tools (Phing, Yeoman, Grunt, etc.) are all the rage, so let's use them with Drupal! This session explores how to build a Drupal site (and some other goodies) using Grunt, a Javascript task runner.

We'll discuss:

1. How to setup your repository to work with Grunt
2. Grunt syntax
3. What type of tasks can be automated with Grunt
4. What other tools can be added to your repository

Drupal makes up about 2% of the internet. Craft beer makes up about 2% of the beer market.

Drupalists are creative and dedicated. Craft brewers are creative and dedicated

Drupal thrives on collaboration and community, Craft beer thrives on collaboration and community

As a beer geek and a Drupalist, I've noticed many parallels between what it takes to brew an amazing beer and produce a successful Drupal website. In this session, we'll analyze these commonalities and see what lessons we we can draw from them.

Maps can be a powerful way to display your data. Drupal provides a number of modules and tools for displaying your data on a map. In this session, we’ll use Drupal modules to place your users on a map of Wonderland, along with a few more practical examples of how to use maps with Drupal.

This session will survey the various mapping solutions available for Dupal 7 ranging from the Location module to Open Layers to Leaflet. We will help sitebuilders understand the options available to them and decide which solutions are most appropriate for their situation.