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An overview of March Global Training Days

Drupal Global Training Days had a great start in 2018. And it keeps that fast pace. The March wave of events featured 13 GTDs in such countries as Rwanda, China, Japan, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Mexico, the USA, Nicaragua. Some of the trainings were delivered online and were accessible for everyone from around the globe.

Drupical.com shows training events around the world

Highlights from the organizers

We contacted several GTD organizers and asked them to share some insights on their events and local communities. Thank you Miriam, Suzanne, and Strahinja for participating. I share my story below too.

Miriam Torres (mtorresn) from Monterrey, Mexico

GTD event in MonterreyHow did you get started with GTD?

In Mexico there is a lot of talent in the IT area, which is why we started to organize GTD in Monterrey, Mexico several years ago with the intention of both growing the Drupal community in Monterrey, and discovering talents to which we can offer job opportunities.

GTD event in MonterreyWho helped to make your training happen?

Many talented people have supported this training and Accenture has been our sponsor for several years. However, Eduardo Santiago has been our main organizer, who has been present at all our events. In our March event, 8 speakers shared with us a little of their knowledge in very diverse subjects (Gerardo García (jerrygarciab), Omar González, Luis Nicanor (luisnicg), Reinaldo Araque (jr-araque), Omar Aguirre (omers), Aldo Velasco (aldovelco), Eduardo Santiago (lalosg) and Miriam Torres) and 6 staff members made our event possible (Magdalena Lozano (Magdalena.Lo), Adrián Briano (AdrianBrianoG), Ruth Medina, Karla González, Ricardo Bolio and Ramiro García). We also had the support of Tec Milenio University who gave us access to their campus and helped us spread the word about the event.

GTD event in MonterreyHow many attended your March 2018 event and what did they say they wanted?

In GTD of March 2018, we had a total of 49 attendees, most of whom wanted to learn a little more about frontend development, but we had people with special interest in backend development and testing in attendance too.

What new knowledge did attendees receive from you?

On March 16, we held a meetup with 5 talks: "Reactive programming" (Gerardo García), "SCRUM: An agile framework" (Omar González), "Organizing Drupal Teams" (Luis Nicanor), "Docker + Drupal, Practical applications and its integration with Drupal" (Reinaldo Araque) and "Component-Driven design using Pattern Lab" (Omar Aguirre), and on March 17, our attendees took a training, choosing between 2 different topics: Site Building with Drupal 8 (Eduardo Santiago) and Angular + Drupal REST. (Aldo Velasco, Gerardo García and Miriam Torres)

Suzanne Dergacheva (pixelite) from Montreal, Canada

Suzanne hosts a Drupal training eventHow did you get started with GTD?

We started our Drupal training program at Evolving Web in 2012 by giving a free training at DrupalCamp Montreal. Since then, we've been offering professional Drupal trainings on a wide range of topics as well as community trainings at camps. We regularly offer free trainings through Global Training Days, and have done both in-person and online trainings for GTD. Inspired by this, we're now offering a monthly free, online 'What is Drupal' session.

Drupal training in MontrealWho helped to make your training happen?

I led the training at Evolving Web. The Drupal Association helped promote the event with emails and we had lots of re-tweets from others in the Drupal community which helped spread the word.

Drupal training in MontrealHow many attended your March 2018 event and what did they say they wanted to learn?

We had around 50 participants in our online video conference. Some of them were exploring Drupal and trying to see if it's a good fit for their projects, others were Drupal 7 users trying to figure out what's new in Drupal 8.

What new knowledge did attendees receive from you?

We offer a 'What is Drupal?' Introductory course for the Global Training Days. It introduces participants to Drupal terminology and general concepts. Participants get to follow along with hands-on exercises and explore why they would use Drupal. They see what you get out-of-the-box with Drupal and what you can customize it to do. They see the role of themes and modules. The training also introduces participants to the Drupal community so that they can see the importance of community contributions and the value of open source.

My story: Marina Paych (paych) from Omsk, Russia

GTD in OmskHow did you get started with GTD?

Initially the Omsk Drupal Community emerged in 2013 from random meetups. The first GTD happened in 2014 and was aimed to engage more people with Drupal and involve them in the community’s life. Since that time, GTD has been being organized regularly and more and more people attend this event.

GTD in OmskWho helped to make your training happen?

The greatest help comes from the company ADCI Solutions. They sponsor all the expenses connected with the organization of GTDs and other Drupal Meetups in our city. Also, they provide a venue in their office called ADCI Events Hub.

The organizers of this event put many efforts in order to make an interesting event in a warm atmosphere. Anastasia Dubina (anastasiya-dubina) was responsible for an overall organizational process such as promoting the event, setting up logistics and equipment, preparing coffee breaks, etc. And I was responsible for agenda management and speakers preparation.

We had 8 amazing speakers who delivered plenty of useful information: Denis Usov (usdv), Tatiana Shulgina (tatiana-shulgina), Artyom Zenkovets (azenkovets), Alexander Kuznetsov (bikba), Maksim Lukyanchikov (max-luckianchikov), Dmitry Chuchin (choo_choo), Iuliia Gapunenko (iuliia_g), and Marina Kardopolova (mkardo).

GTD in OmskHow many attended your March 2018 event and what did they say they wanted to learn?

There were 93 attendees at March GTD. The target audience of GTD in Omsk consists of students and recent graduates, therefore they wanted to learn about the whole web development process and how it is operated by a real company. Also, they wanted to try themselves in development. Around 60% of attendees were more interested in back end, and 40% -- in front end.

What new knowledge did attendees receive from you?

On March, 17 attendees listened to 5 sessions aimed to explain the peculiarities of Drupal development. The agenda covered all the processes, and sessions were logically connected to each other in order to show to attendees a full idea of web development.

In the first session -- “How to create a web application architecture” -- Denis Usov narrated about each role in a web development team and how they work for a successful result. The second session “The role of a designer in an IT team” by Tatiana Shulgina clarified web designers’ responsibilities and tasks in a project. The third session “What is back end?” delivered by Artyom Zenkovets and Alexander Kuznetsov contained information about traditional and decoupled approaches and the specifics of back end in Drupal. The fourth session “How to become a front-end Jedi” by Maskim Lukyanchikov and Dmitry Chuchin included a list of tools and useful links that will help newcomers dive into the JS world.
The final session of the first day was dedicated to the Drupal Community and ways to get involved and was delivered by Iuliia Gapunenko. She also showed videos about how Drupal changed many people’s lives from her #DrupalChanges campaign.

On March, 18 there was a training where attendees could use their new knowledge in practice within a captivating coding competition. First, attendees were taught to build their first website and then - to code a custom module. The training was delivered by Marina Kardopolova.

Strahinja Miljanovic (SixZeroNine) from Novi Sad, Serbia

Drupal training in Novi SadHow did you get started with GTD?

Colleagues and I were discussing how many people they know who are using other CMS and they've never used Drupal. We heard that we have Global Training Day coming soon and we wanted to invite people to come, see, try and learn Drupal. So we created a Google Event Registration Form with questions that will help us to see how many people know about Drupal, are they more interested in Theming, Site Building or Developing custom modules.

GTD in Novi SadWho helped to make your training happen?

Vladimir Zdravkovic (botanic_spark), ramns, helped with sessions, Dragan Eror - with workshops. Radoslav Curcic (wingpaler) and Aleksandar Cvijovic (cvijo) contributed to both sessions and workshop. Miki Stojkovic (mikispeed) provided space, food, and refreshments. And I was an organizer of the event.

GTD in Novi SadHow many attended your March 2018 event and what did they say they wanted to learn?

The number of people who applied to attend the event was 23. Almost everybody wanted to learn everything, but it was physically impossible to hold all sessions and workshops one at the time, so we merged Site Building and Module development. 90% of the people wanted to learn site-building and module development more than Theming.

What new knowledge did attendees receive from you?

Attendees from Site Building learned how to create nodes, content types, block types, views (page, block, filtering, and sorting), taxonomies, fields and basic and most common hook examples.

Attendees from Developing Custom Modules learned how to create a module, how to enable it VIA interface, Drush, as dependency and hook_install. They also learned to create configuration forms and blocks programmatically and render input data from configuration form into a custom block.

Attendees from Drupal 8 Theming learned about general themes and twig, How to create a theme and subtheme, theme suggestion, regions, libraries, adding CSS and js files, adding custom classes and adding templates.

Join the movement

That was a report on how March Global Training Days went. You still have a chance to join the movement, organize an outstanding GTD in June, September, or December, and get featured in an upcoming blog post.

If you are in doubt about whether to organize a GTD event or not, check out the GTD group where you can find the GTD Working Group if you need help. Also, follow @DrupalGTD on Twitter to stay tuned.

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