Forest Mars
Forest Mars is a New York based hypermedia architect who works extensively with Drupal, using it in pioneering projects such as New York's first/only free Internet café, the city's first wireless Internet service provider, a video delivery network for the world's largest television network and New York City's first civic engagement platform for the borough of Manhattan.
He most recent position was CTO of the 2nd highest funded Drupal startup in the world, picked by Business Insider as one of the top 3 Silicon Alley companies to watch in 2012 and by Forbes as one of the "10 Brilliant Apps every SMB should be using."
Currently, he's the Director of Drupal Solutions at Elephant Ventures (http://elephantventures.com), a boutique engineering firm focusing high performance continuous integration, large data operations and ecommerce.
Forest also serves as President of the Community Free Software Group, a 501c3 foundation dedicated to advancing the cause of free and open networks.
Presenter for the following session(s):
Raising the Bar for Drupal: WSCCI, Scotch & Vodka (and Rum!)
Development & Performance | IntermediateThis session is a deep dive into the data structures and paradigms introduced in Drupal 8 / Symfony2, looking at key initiatives to uncover the fundamental changes in Drupal architecture and new coding patterns, focusing especially on how they'll change both the way you'll build in Drupal once D8 is released, and how they should inform your current development.
RAISING THE BAR
We'll go over what's really driving these sweeping changes, how this "leveling up" impacts requirements and what this means for the contrib space-- how to jump in feet first architecting and implementing *hypermedia* applications in Drupal 8.
TAMING THE DX BEAST
Among other things, we'll cover route subscribers, nested matchers & event handlers (oh my!) as well as config entities, dependency injection, entity 'entification' as well as rest interfaces, & service descriptions. Rather than considering parts in isolation, we'll examine the crucial (and as of this posting, not fully baked) changes found in key D8 initiatives and how they work together with 3 major new subsystems (context, routing & plugins) and the 11 Symfony2 components already used in D8, as well as how this integrates with EntityNG and the new templating system, all with an eye on an end-to-end understanding of Drupal 8 architectural patterns, so that by the end of the session attendees will leave with a deep understanding of the inner workings of Drupal 8.
Each of the components covered will be explained in detail, elaborating on the reasons why it's implemented in the specific way it is, for example, why a particular architectural pattern implemented in Drupal 8 is Restful, not so much in terms of what Rest is, but how a specific Drupal implementation of the Rest pattern enables us to build performant applications, and how you can implement this patten in Drupal/Symfony code to insure the app you build is scalable. We'll go over code examples for the major patterns you need to know to quickly
build really tight Drupal 8 sites/applications that are highly performant.
This session is marked for intermediate developent but is also appropriate for other tracks and also both advanced & beginner levels. This is a must attend session for anyone interested in learning Drupal 8.
*Vodka is the jocular name for Views in Core initiative which finally made Drupal's contrib query builder / display manager part of the Drupal core.
** RUM* is "Responsive User Mobile" (Alternately: *alternately, MARTINI: Mobile And Responsive Theming Is Now In (Drupal) .@EclipseGC) is a re-Christening of the previously dully named Mobile initiative which aims to make Drupal 8 the best mobile CMS "on the planet."