Podcast appearances and mentions of allison manley

Allison Manley is a recovering (and award-winning) designer who applies her creative and organizational skills to marketing strategy for Kanopi Studios. Her diverse, multi-disciplinary background — which in addition to design includes glassblowing, publishing, podcasting, and figure skating — contributes to strong relationships to which she offers a broad perspective. She also considers figure skating the best sport in the world and created the Manleywoman SkateCast years before podcasting became a thing.

Guest host Allison Manley, formerly host of “The Manleywoman SkateCast,” discusses turning weaknesses into strengths with David Santee and Olympic and World Champion Scott Hamilton.

Allison Manley, competitive figure skater, designer, and the first to launch a podcast dedicated to figure skating. Her work is featured as part of the United States Figure Skating 100 year celebration of the sport. 

Guest host Allison Manley, formerly host of “The Manleywoman SkateCast,” discusses memories of the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics with David Santee and Olympic and World Champion Scott Hamilton.

TRANSCRIPT: This story is written by Allison Manley. Allison writes speculative fiction, book reviews, and the occasional personal essay. She’s currently working on her MFA at Queens University Charlotte. She likes beer, opera, and dogs This is “Dido Spell”. Gary and I hadn’t talked in a while—not since he got famous—so I was surprised when, one … Continue reading Gateways: “Dido Spell” by Allison Manley read by John Weagly →

There is not currently a transcript available for this classic episode. Please join us on January 14 for our next live reading at Otherworld Theatre.

TRANSCRIPT: This story is written by Allison Manley. Allison is currently an MFA in writing candidate at Queens University Charlotte. She received her Bachelor’s in English with writing concentration & honors in 2012. She published one short story in the Chicago Reader and has performed at readings in Chicago with Unreal (monthly open mic night) and … Continue reading Gateways: “Focus on the Job” by Allison Manley, read by Kate Akerboom →

In this episode we’re speaking with Allison Manley, creator of the Manleywoman SkateCast. Which she hosted for 8 years starting in early 2007, before taking a well deserved hiatus. We had a great conversation with Alison about launching a podcast, the world of figure skating, unexpected answers to interview questions, and why she’s been itching to get back into the podcast game.

Welcome to the latest episode of On the Air with Palantir, a long-form (ad-hoc) podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. In this episode, Allison Manley is joined by Juan Daniel Flores of Rootstack, and Juan dives into the Drupal world of Latin and Central America. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley: Hi, everyone. Welcome to On the Air With Palantir, a podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to web design and development. I'm Allison Manley, Sales and Marketing manager. Today, my guest is Juan Daniel Flores of Rootstack. Juan spent some time with me a few months back telling me about all the exciting things happening with Drupal in Latin America. Here we are at DrupalCon Baltimore 2017-   Juan D. Flores: That's right. AM: ... in the convention center at the corner of Pratt and Charles Street. I am sitting with ... JDF: Juan Flores from Rootstack from Panama. AM: From Panama. You came all the way from Panama. JDF: Yes, sunny, tropical Panama. Yeah. The temperature is quite a good a change for me. AM: Is it? JDF: I was born in Colombia, in Bogota, actually. The temperature is more or less like this. I really miss the cool temperature, because in Panama, sometimes it gets really, really hot. AM: Well, we're welcome to give you a nice, rainy break, so ... JDF: Yeah, I appreciate it. AM: Is this your first Drupal Con? JDF: Yeah, this is my first personal, my first Drupal Con in the States, but we have been attending Drupal Con like, since five years ago. We are three partners, and they do most of the traveling. AM: Okay. Excellent. How long have you been involved in Drupal? JDF: We have been involved with Drupal like from seven years ago right after college. We graduated, and we got our degrees, and we started the company. We started with Drupal right away. We learned about Drupal, actually, by a friend in the college. It was like we saw the tool. We saw all the things that you could do, and we were like hooked up, like, "We have to do this. We have to use this." It's been quite a long time. AM: Wow. That's great. Were you self-taught or ... JDF: Totally self-taught. In the university, they teach you certain things, but to be, to thrive in this world, you really have to be very proficient in learning by yourself. You have to be active. You have to be checking what's going in the world. Thanks to our desire to know more, we picked it up and here we are seven years later. AM: And here you are. Glad to have you. You call yourselves the Drupaleros, sort of jokingly. JDF: Yeah, that's the term we use for Drupal. That's in Spanish. It's a term that we use in general. AM: Universally. JDF: Yeah. Universal. AM: So that's not just the Panamanian- JDF: Exactly. Exactly. AM: Okay. I feel like there's a presentation next year for just the Spanish-speaking Drupaleros. I feel like there's some sort of presentation you should make around that and what's happening in Latin and Central America. JDF: That will be interesting. Even though like I feel that we're a little bit late to the party, in terms of doing stuff, there has been a lot of work that has been done by Latin developers. For example, there's Jesus Olivas, which is ... Well, and the team from We Know It, that they have been working hard with the Drupal console project, which is picking up, really, a great amount of fans. He gave a talk yesterday. He's from Mexico. There's another guy. His name is Omers. He's also from Mexico. The other guys, Anso and Kenya are from Costa Rica. AM: How many would you say there are total between Latin and Central America, you know, that you keep in touch with on a regular basis working in Drupal? JDF: It's hard to tell to know a certain number because, unfortunately, the community there is like a little bit shy. But I can say that, for example, if I can measure events that we have gone to, for example, the DrupalCon in Costa Rica, or the DrupalCon Central America that we did a couple years ago, I would say we could see around 400, but it's hard to ... They show up for events. There are a lot of people that show at events. It's the the building the community that's hard. AM: How did you start out? Tell me about the beginnings of your business, then. JDF: We were in college. One of the partners approach to us. He told us like, "Hey, I think we should do this. We should make a company for our own." We are good, each one, in our own stuff. For example, one of the partners is very good at business development, organizing. The other one is very good at developing. He's a very strong skill set. I'm more like the creative one in terms of design, in terms of implementing the science. We're sort like a match in terms of our skills. We started that in 2010, and we slowly grew. We recruited guys fresh out of college from our own university. Then, we started to build the team. One of the things that I have heard here is that it's hard to find Drupal developers. Which if it's hard for you, it's harder for us. It's been years of finding good people that we think that can be a good fit and training them. I think there's a value in that, in home-growing the developers. Because if they aren't there, you have to make them. AM: Right. How big are you now? JDF: We are 25. AM: Oh, so you went from 3 to 25 in just seven years. JDF: Yeah. AM: Wow. JDF: We have 18 developers. Then marketing sales, designers, so yeah. We hope to keep growing, and yeah. Basically, the objective is to be bigger, to go for more services. Even though we started as a Drupal shop, now we're doing more stuff. We're doing automations. We're doing mobile development. We're doing interesting projects in terms of challenges. For example, last year we did a project for a company here. Basically, we did a mobile app in Ionic that you could turn on, turn off, set the temperature of your spa machine. They sell spa machines that have a wifi antennae. You could be in your office, and you say, "Oh, I'm going home." You start the spa. You set the temperature. When you get there, there it is. AM: That's excellent. JDF: Yeah. AM: That's quite a range of services that you do provide already, even if you feel like you want to add more. JDF: Yeah, yeah. It is to find projects that are challenging and interesting. That's the what we're looking for. AM: What would you say is your main client base or what vertical? JDF: Basically, companies that split in two, in terms of half the company works with agencies here in the States providing Drupal services, so back-end, front-end development, and the other half of the team works with local clients. In terms of local and regional clients, our main verticals are government, banks, certain industries, like ... You have big clients like supermarket chains, people that are looking for very complex web projects, or automations, or yeah, that kind of solutions that we can provide. Yeah, that's what we are ... The companies, like two companies in terms of what we focus on. AM: Fair enough. Your first DrupalCon, what do you think so far? JDF: It's been great. I mean, the level of the sessions have been great. I really like the fact that people are very open to talk, very friendly. I know that in our conferences that, for example, I have been, it's harder to meet people, to find a point of conversation where you can start. But here, it has been great. The parties have been great, also. They provide a good space for talking. For example, yesterday, I was with the guys at Lullabot. They were super friendly, super fun. We have a lot of fun. Yeah, I really like. It's right what they say about the Drupal community. It's very open and very ... Well, even though what has happened recently, I think the people here are very good people, you know? AM: I would agree with that. JDF: Well, I hope that you go next year to Nashville. AM: I will be there in Nashville. I would love to go to Costa Rica if I could swing it, but- JDF: Yeah, so there in August. It's super fun. There's a good vibe always. We always do some, like after the camp, we always do like a trip to an island, or a beach, or- AM: Forest. Something. JDF: Yeah, very relaxing. AM: Sounds amazing. JDF: You can add your vacations and you do a- AM: Any others to look forward to or ... JDF: That's the ones I think right now the top of my head. AM: All right. JDF: I think Mexico is organizing one, too. AM: Fantastic. JDF: Yeah. AM: Look forward to it. JDF: Yeah. AM: Thank you so much, Juan. JDF: Yeah, look forward to seeing you. Thank you. AM: Thanks for listening. Follow us on Twitter at Palantir or read our blog at palantir.net. Have a great day.

TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley: Hi and welcome to the Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net. I’m Allison Manley, the sales and marketing manager here, and today we’re giving you something a little bit different and special. It is the end of 2016, soon to be 2017. We are moving our offices, relocating across the border a little bit to Evanston, Illinois. So we wanted to write a little poem for everybody based off of “‘Twas The Night Before Christmas” to sum up how we felt about 2016 and where we’re going next year. So it’s time to cue the sleigh bells. And here we go:   T’was the night before moving. The office was busy. Boxes and bubble wrap all in a tizzy!   We have to pack up, and keep at a fast pace! Palantir’s moving to a new space.   A new year is always a chance to reset. So we can create our most thoughtful work yet.   This year was a ride, with a nation divided Though some would stay home and remain undecided.   The world lost some favorites.* They left quite a void. A poet. A writer. A mischievous droid.   The perkiest mom. A singer of soul.   A journalist in an award-winning role.   A boxer. A wizard. A Duke and a Prince. A candyman too . . . this year made us wince.   But “Sweet Home Chicago” could trade in those tears With Cubs being champs for the first time in years!   2016 was a ride, there’s no doubt. There were ups, there were downs, and much angst about.   Since this year has seen things get often divisive, Our mission continues to be quite decisive.   The web is a tool that can bring us together. Palantir believes this now more than ever.   In our effort to help remove every wedge, We give you our 2017 pledge:   It strengthens humanity to share and create. And knowledge is something that we celebrate.   Our clients have always been those who endeavor To make the world better, more honest, more clever.   So as we work to craft each client site, We’ll make their online space extra bright.   Our Strategists will see where each audience went, To recommend best how to manage content.   Designers will theme with a deft and skilled hand, With type and hierarchy enhancing the brand.   Front-End Developers will translate each page Perfecting the code for the following stage.   Engineers will create a solid foundation With open-source code and much dedication.   Directors and Managers, Sales and the rest Clear out the hurdles so all do their best.   It’s a process that’s seamless and quite efficient. After twenty years on, we’re very proficient!   In short: we’ll work to create more connections. This includes expanding our craft for confections!   The packing is done, and now we move North To Davis Street, Evanston, we shall go forth.   We’re sure he will find us, that Santa and sleigh To bring cheer to all beyond New Year’s Day.   A toast to this year as the curtain descends, Onwards and upwards with clients and friends.   So bring it on January! The stage is set. Happy holidays from Palantir.net!

With the advancement of technology, there are infinite ways and opportunities to work remotely, no matter where you are. In this week’s episode of The Secret Sauce, we share some strategies for making remote work - well, work. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hello and welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a little bit of advice to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, Sales and Marketing Manager here, and today’s advice comes from Scott DiPerna and Lauren Byrwa. In this global economy, there are infinite ways and opportunities to work remotely, no matter where you are. Scott and Lauren are going to share some strategies on how to collaborate successfully across great distances and time zones. Scott DiPerna [SD]: Hi, I’m Scott DiPerna. Lauren Byrwa [LB]: Hi, I’m Lauren Byrwa. SD: Recently we worked with a client in California who had hired a content strategy team in New York City. Lauren, with our development team, was in Chicago, and I, as the Project Manager, was in South Africa. We had lots of interesting new challenges in this project, and like we do in most projects, we learned a lot about working well with our clients, our collaborators, and with each other. LB: So, Scott, what was it like trying to work from South Africa, being seven to nine hours ahead of everyone else? SD: Well, it wasn’t that different from working remotely in Richmond, Virginia. I do shift my working hours to the evening to overlap with the team in the States. But just as I did in Virginia, we do all of our meetings on a video chat regardless of where we are. It’s part of our process especially with our clients being all over the country, so that part wasn’t really different. But we did do a few things differently in this project — not so much because we were all in different places, but because we had multiple vendors and teams collaborating together. Do you want to talk about some of the adjustments that we made in terms of meetings? LB: Yeah, so we met with the content strategy team weekly. We met with our product owner three times a week. We met with our full team, our full team of stakeholders, weekly. And in addition to that we still had all our usual agile ceremonies like scrum, demos, retrospectives, that we always do on projects. These meetings especially were productive because we had all of the strategic functionality up front, and we could ask specific implementation-level questions early on, and we could vet them both with the product owner specifically, with the strategists specifically, and with the entire group. But I think there are a few other ways that the thorough strategy helped. Do you want to talk about those? SD: Sure. I think there were two parts specifically that were really helpful. Doing a lot of the strategic planning up front meant that the client was a lot more conversant in the details of the product that we were planning to build for them. We just had a lot more conversations with them up-front and could talk in detail. The other piece was having much of the functionality visually documented in wireframes that the strategy team kept current with changes in the functionality meant that the client always had a “picture” in their minds of what it was that we were talking about. When everyone is working remotely from one another, these kinds of visuals help conversations over video chat be infinitely more productive, which I think is something we see in all of our projects. So all of this planning had a really helpful impact on your ability to estimate the work up front, too. Do you want to talk a bit about that? LB: Because we had the complete and canonical wireframes from the strategists we were able to fairly precisely estimate all of the functionality that they had scoped out in those wireframes. This meant that even before we started development, we were able to work with our product owner to go over in detail the scope of work we anticipated to be able to complete within their budget. We had many conversations with him about what features would be most important for their users, and were able to prioritize accordingly. It meant that we could talk about the specifics of our implementation in really granular detail internally, both with the strategists, both with the product owner. We collaboratively evaluated if there were options to streamline our implementation, and we were able to address specific questions that usually would not come up until user acceptance testing.   All of these conversations resulted in updates to both the canonical wireframes that the strategists were maintaining, as well as the implementation documentation that we were maintaining on our end. And it meant that the picture that the strategists had, that they kept, that the clients had in their head, stayed the same. And it was all reflected in what they could expect to be spending on the implementation for development. SD: Right. And since we were documenting those functional changes in the wireframes, we could capture that quickly and review it with the client in the middle of a sprint. And speaking of that sort of adjustment in the middle of a sprint, you started doing mini-demos of work in progress, demoing that to the product owner. Can you talk a little bit about why you shifted in that direction? LB: Yeah, so because we already had all of these meetings set up, and because we already had those canonical wireframes that showed all of the functionality in the picture, we wanted to make sure that they could see the picture of their website, the implementation, as quickly as possible too. So when we had specific implementation questions about things that were spec-ed out in the wireframes, we would demo it for the client. And they could vet it, both for the client and the strategists, and come back to that . . . is this the best choice for the user. It meant that all of those questions of, is this the best route to go down, does this work the way that I anticipated it to, were answered not even before user acceptance testing — they were answered even before the demo. So we could pivot our strategy accordingly, and we did on a lot of issues. SD: So given all of these constraints that we faced on the project, where we had a client in one part of the States, a content strategy team in another part of the States, even our own internal strategy team split up across continents, and a pretty sizeable project with some interesting technical projects to solve — what were some of the biggest take-aways that you had from that project? LB: I think the number one thing that I took away from that project was that we can solve every problem together, and that we can come to a better conclusion when we come to it together. The collaborative effort with the strategy team to focus conversations through the lens of the primary audience really helped us anchor our strategy and our implementation in that primary user, and not in some of the other things that often derail projects. We had complete and thorough documentation both on the strategy level and on the implementation, and both of those were transparent to everyone accessing the project. And I think that really helped us to streamline the entire project. SD: I think for me one of the other things is that we were able to form really good relationships both with the client and with the third-party team we were collaborating with. And that made all of our conversations run more smoothly. We were able to have fun even in the difficult phases of the project, and even going through tough negotiations around scope or functionality or budgets or stuff like that — having those good relationships and having that good level of communication with them just made the whole process go more smoothly. AM: That’s the end of this week’s Secret Sauce. For more great tips, please check out our website at Palantir.net. You can also follow us on twitter at @palantir. Have a great day!

Director of Operations Colleen Carroll reveals some of her favorite collaboration tools in this week’s episode of the Secret Sauce. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hello, and welcome to the Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is a short podcast in which we offer a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, Sales and Marketing Manager at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from our Director of Operations Colleen Carroll, who talks about how the right collaboration tools can make everyone’s workday go a whole lot smoother. Colleen Carroll [CC]: Hi, my name is Colleen, and I’m here today to talk about collaboration tools that we use here at Palantir. We use many different tools here at Palantir, but the ones that I’m going to be focusing on the most are the ones that are basic to being a Palantiri — the tools that we use to communicate and collaborate effectively as a remote-first culture. Some of the tools that are pretty essential to being a Palantiri are really the Google suite. And by that I mean that we use email, through Gmail of course. And that works, that allows us to communicate with each other. But it’s really all the other things that come with the Google apps domain. We use Google Docs for everything. We don’t have Microsoft Office or anything really installed on the computer. We rely on the cloud, we rely on Google Docs in the cloud, to hop in a document together, to draft a note together, to put draft agendas together or to take minutes together. We also use Google spreadsheets and Google presentations. If we can’t get in a document and look at it together, it’s almost as though we’re missing a critical function. We’ve been using the Google suite for many years now. One of the other critical parts of the Google suite that we use is Hangouts. We use that for lightweight video conversations. Because we’re not all here in person sometimes, it’s important that everyone who’s on a meeting be able to see each other, and to be able to talk at balanced and equal volume so that everyone can hear each other. And to that end we also require that people have really good headsets and microphones. So much so that if you’re on a Hangout with a Palantiri, they will correct you and stop the meeting to help you tweak your audio settings so that they can hear you well. Because we have such an inclusive culture here, we want to make sure that everybody has an equal place in the conversation. And you can do that with Google Hangouts by seeing every person and hearing them. One of the other nice things about Google Hangouts and, really, many of the video chat tools now, is that it allows you to share your screen. So it’s another way to collaborate. Let’s get right to it, what are you seeing, let me see that, oh, I know what that means. It allows us to really have a much more informed conversation. Another Google tool that is crucial to our day-to-day is Google Calendars. Because everybody has a Google account, they can easily subscribe to any other Palantir team member’s [Google] Calendar. They can see where they’re at, they can schedule a meeting, they can ask them if they can move a meeting. It makes it really easy to get things scheduled, because we aren’t all here in person and can’t stop by somebody’s desk. By providing that information on demand, it makes it easier to collaborate. The last Google-related tool that I think really empowers the sharing of information and greater ability to collaborate is the Google Drive. Obviously when you use a Google Doc, a Google spreadsheet, a Google presentation, it puts it right up into the Google Drive. But the Google Drive is only as successful as it is organized. And so one of the things that we’ve done is to create a Palantir shared folder, and tried really hard to organize it so that people can easily find things. Again, that on-demand nature is important to our culture because — I don’t always know what people need and at what point in time. I can certainly send an email communication saying, here’s that presentation I made, or, here’s that 360-degree review form. But people don’t always need it right then and there. However, if I have a folder structure, you can kind of consider it like a library that’s easily browsable and accessible, they may find, oh, there’s that 360-degree form, or, look, inside there is that presentation that’s a quick-start guide on how I can solicit 360-degree reviews from my peers. So we try to organize and present information in a way that’s easily accessible and shareable, and in a format that’s easy to collaborate. So to use the 360-degree form again, sometimes people on the team want to create a 360-degree review, but they may want some help drafting questions — creating questions that give them the right amount of constructive feedback. So if they create a document on the Google Drive, they can share it with me and I can coach them through maybe some different wording, help them redefine their goals. It’s not only them being able to create the form themselves, but them being able to share it with me very easily allows for a stronger collaboration and a more effective outcome. One of the last tools that we use, really for communication and collaboration but most for communication, is HipChat. It is essentially our water cooler. It’s our primary mode of having conversations with each other. Inside of HipChat we organize conversations into different rooms. We have a general Palantir room that’s usually the laughter and giggles room, where we share images and videos with each other, and talk about day-to-day things. But then we have more topic-based rooms like a sales room or a design room or a coders’ lounge. We have a social room, we have a spoilers room for people who are all watching the same television shows, and other things that help build our unique culture here. We have HipChat set up so that all things are available to all Palantiri, and again that helps spur conversations that are important to the team and are share those with other members of the team, and aren’t pushed from the top down. They’re not structured in any particular way. At Palantir, the ability to collaborate virtually is key, especially as a virtual team. We wouldn’t be able to do that without these tools, without the Google suite, using Docs, presentations, Hangouts, Calendars, the Google Drive and the shared folders. There are much more tools within the production team as well that help facilitate peer programming, and I think you should stay tuned for a further podcast to hear more about those tools. Thanks! AM: Thanks Colleen. That’s the end of this week’s Secret Sauce. For more great tips, please check out our website at Palantir.net. You can also follow us on twitter at @palantir. Enjoy your day!

Senior Engineer Ryan Price dives into the importance of documentation in this week’s episode of the Secret Sauce. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hello and welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a little bit of advice to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager, and today we have Senior Engineer Ryan Price talking about the importance of documentation and training.   Ryan Price [RP]: My name is Ryan Price, and I want to talk a little bit today about documentation and training. Probably the key person that I think about when I get into the role of writing documentation for a project is future me. Who is the person that will be reading this later, and who is the person that’s going to get the most benefit out of it? Then I sort of go from there, because the more people that get involved with the project — whether it’s someone on the client side, whether they’re technical or non-technical, whether it’s other members of the development team, or maybe my project manager — all of those people are going to read or edit or touch the documentation of a project at some point. And on a lot of projects I’ve worked on in the past, I have been in the role of training the new people who are going to be using that project, whether it’s other developers or the content editor who’s working on the client side. And all of those people need to know what this website is supposed to be doing. Beyond just the business goals, there’s lots of nuts and bolts things, and in the land of Drupal we have lots of nuts and bolts things. And for some people those things are totally new, and they have fun new words like ‘nodes’ and ‘taxonomy’ and ‘views.’ And for other people, they know those things, but they haven’t seen this way for placing blocks in this context, whatever that happens to be. So I think even a simple project that is just a brochure site would still have documentation that needs to be written for future me. When I come back to this project, I don’t want to spend five hours remembering my motivation behind making a new field for this. It should just be there. What does this field do and why do we have it? You want to get this stuff out of your head. If you get hit by a bus, you don’t want to be the person on the project who made something that was indecipherable and everyone needs to sit around and figure it out. And the other thing is, when you explain something, you learn it. There’s doing it and being able to do it yourself, versus having to write it down. For me, translating something out of my head into speaking is when I really understand what it is that I’m doing, or writing it down at the same time. And you can also discover things about the project, too. Like discovering when a requirement is unclear, or when a piece of work is not quite polished. Because you’re getting ready to document it, and you say, it’s supposed to do these nine things and it does eight of them really well. So there are lots and lots of benefits to documenting your project and teaching someone else how to use it, and I think probably the key person among those is future me. Thank you for listening! AM: Thanks Ryan. That’s the end of this week’s Secret Sauce. For more great tips, please check out our website at Palantir.net. You can also follow us on twitter at @palantir. Have a great day!

In this week’s episode of The Secret Sauce, Palantir Founder and CEO George DeMet dives into the importance of being in tune with your company’s purpose. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a quick piece of advice to help your business run a little bit better. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager at Palantir, and today we’re talking with our Founder, George DeMet. He’s going to share why it’s so critical to understand your company’s purpose. It sounds like a basic concept, but it’s important to give clarity around why a company exists. George DeMet [GD]: In a previous installment of the Special Sauce a couple of months ago, I talked a little bit about my personal history with family-run businesses and some of the values and principles that have helped guide some of the world’s most enduring companies. Values and principles are important because they help answer the question of how we as a company strive to interact with each other, with our customers, and with the world around us. Today, I’d like to talk about the importance of understanding your company’s purpose, or why it is that we do what we do. Being able to say what it is that gives your company direction and purpose is vital to attracting motivated employees and helping prospective customers understand why they should choose to work with you. Knowing what you do and why you do it is essential, but so is being able to communicate that vision to others. A core purpose can be articulated in many ways. If you’re a very small company, everyone on the team probably already knows and understands your core purpose, and you may not even need to articulate it. But as your company grows and evolves, chances are that not everyone will come in with that shared understanding, and you’ll need to find a succinct and understandable way to describe to others the reason why your company exists. Now the flip answer is “because getting a paycheck is what puts a roof over my head and food on my table”, but I think we can all agree that that’s not enough. There are a lot of different ways to make money, and we make a deliberate choice to do what we do. Fundamentally, a core purpose is an organization’s most fundamental reason for being. It does not change, but it inspires change. And most importantly, it must be authentic to the organization’s values and culture. Many companies have a mission statement, which is a (usually) brief and aspirational statement describing what it is that the company seeks to do. The difference between a mission statement and a vision statement is that a mission statement focuses on a company’s present state while a vision statement focuses on a company’s future.  Some companies tend to blend these statements, and in most cases, that’s okay. What’s important is that there’s an easy way for people to understand what the company is about and its approach. This is usually something that appears in the company handbook or field guide, and it’s often on the website as well. To be clear, a mission statement or purpose is something that should be distinct from your tagline or marketing slogan. It’s my belief that regardless of what form it takes, a statement of purpose is not one of those things that you can just knock out in a workshop over an afternoon. It needs to come from deep inside you, and it needs to “feel” right. It’s also really important that the stated mission, vision, and values are be aligned with the actual culture of the company, or else they’re just lip service. For example, Enron advertised Communication, Respect, Integrity, and Excellence as their core values, yet the actions of their senior leadership created a culture of greed that encouraged unethical behavior at all levels, using a variety of deceptive, bewildering, and fraudulent accounting practices to make the company appear more profitable than it actually was. The company’s traders were also actively involved in manipulating the energy market in California, illegally cutting power to the state and causing rolling blackouts in order to keep prices artificially inflated. Enron’s CEO, Ken Lay, even bragged to the Chairman of the California Power Authority that "In the final analysis, it doesn't matter what you crazy people in California do, because I got smart guys who can always figure out how to make money." 
 I would argue that one of the most important things that the executive leadership of a company can do is to reinforce the company’s vision and values. They need to hold other leaders in the organization accountable and accept ultimate responsibility for the company’s actions. As Harry Truman famously put it, the buck stops here. At Palantir, our purpose is to strengthen humanity by helping others discover, create, and share knowledge. This informs the kinds of projects and clients we choose to work with, and along with our values and principles, it informs the approach our team takes to helping solve problems. It’s important to note that our purpose is not connected to any specific technology or even to the web itself; we just happen to believe that at this time and place in human history, the web is the primary conduit by which knowledge is discovered, created, and shared, and that we at Palantir have a role in helping others use the web in a way that helps strengthen humanity. Especially during times of economic and political uncertainty, it’s especially important for companies to understand why they exist. Market conditions and technology change all the time, and if you’re going to be successful in the long term, you need to root yourself in something that is more stable. In our case, that means being able to help customers understand, articulate, and solve their problems in a holistic way. We have always defined our success by the results we help our customers achieve, not by the names of the brands we work with, or the amount of profit we make. At the end of the day, I believe that companies are most effective when they can communicate who they are and why they are here. That’s something that we try to do at Palantir every day, and I think it’s a big part of what’s contributed to our success for the last twenty years. AM: Thank you George! For more great tips, follow us on Twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Enjoy your day.

Listen to Ken Rickard (@agentrickard) discuss some exciting new developments for Workbench in Drupal 8. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hello and welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a little bit of advice to help your business run a little bit better. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager, and today we have our Director of Professional Services  Ken Rickard talking about the state of Workbench in Drupal 8.   Ken Rickard [KR]:  Hi, this is Ken Rickard, the director of professional services at Palantir. Today we’re going to talk about Workbench and the module suite that we developed as part of the Drupal 7 lifecycle. Workbench, if you don’t remember, is a series of three modules that were designed to hit very common publishing use cases. Workbench Moderation is the most popular. It provides for staging previews along an approval workflow. Workbench Access is an editorial access decision module, it lets you decide who can edit content on your worksite. Workbench itself is really just a collection of editorial views to make it easier for people to find the content they need to work on. Since our last blog post on this subject, some really fun and interesting stuff has happened in that space. In particular, if you were at DrupalCon New Orleans, you heard Dries talk about the workflow initiative in Drupal core. What’s fascinating about Drupal core right now is that we contributed a lot of code to Drupal 8 regarding how publishing workflows actually operate, and actually removed some of the barriers that made it harder to do workbench moderation. Some of those things are still there, but because we’re now following a semantic and stable release cycle, so that every six months we have a new release of Drupal that does not break backward compatibility, that means that we can add new modules to core. And there was a movement among the core maintainers — specifically I know that Alex Pott was involved, I know that Nathaniel Catchpole was involved — and they decided that they wanted to push Workbench Moderation into Drupal core in Drupal 8.2, which is the next release that’s coming up, in order to start shaking out the rest of the issues that need to be solved in core that are really specific and relevant to the workflow initiative. The workflow initiative has some really fantastic and ambitious things that are going to be happening, but for it to work properly, all content must be revisionable, and those revisions must have the capacity to be moderated. Since we had a working model of content moderation, that’s going to be brought straight into core and then iterated on. So it’s really fascinating. There are a couple of things that are important about that from our perspective. Number one, it really is a culmination of the work that we started, at this point, seven years ago, in order to make it easier for publishers to use Drupal to accomplish the tasks they need to accomplish. So that’s a huge victory for us; we’re really proud of that. Number two, it does show very good things about the product lifecycle and the maturity of Drupal as a project as Drupal 8 moves forward, this idea that says, hey, we can add new features without breaking backwards compatibility. We’re willing to experiment with things in core in order to improve the experience for our users. I think that’s really critical. So the outcomes of that, which are going to happen pretty rapidly — there’s a developer named Tim Millwood . . . Tim works for Acquia, he’s been involved with the workflow initiative since day one, he’s part of the module acceleration program, and Tim’s been around the Drupal community for quite a long time. Tim’s taking over the workbench moderation in core project, which is going to be called ‘content moderation’. He’s got a first iteration that’s almost ready to be committed into core. So while Tim’s working on the code side, there’s actually part of the Drupal UX team approaching, how does workflow management affect the user interfaces that Drupal presents? And that work is being spearheaded by Roy Scholten and Bojhan Somers and the rest of the UX team. And they’re doing some really exciting stuff. I know they’ve been getting together at the dev days event that just happened in Milan. They’re collaborating quite frequently, which is really exciting to see. So content moderation is going to go into core in 8.2, which essentially means that principal work on Workbench Moderation is going to stop. There’ll be a few bug fixes, and if a security release has to come out, that’s going to stop. But it was yesterday, as we record this, that I made Tim Millwood a maintainer of Workbench Moderation, so that he could work on a 2.X branch, an 8.2 branch of that module, which would just be an upgrade path for current users of the module when the core module goes in. So you can replace what you’re doing in the Workbench module with the core module going forward. So that’s really exciting. And like I was saying, it’s sort of a culmination of what we were hoping for with the module suite as it goes. If you have any questions, you can always reach out to us. We’ll be happy to talk about the future of these things. But from my perspective, it’s really exciting. It’s very gratifying to see things that you thought of years ago moving through being successful in contrib, and then being adopted as sort of essential to the project. And that’s one of the things that keeps us motivated as contributors. AM: That’s it for this week’s Secret Sauce. For more great tips, check out our brand spanking new website at palantir.net, download the Secret Sauces from iTunes, and check us out on Twitter. Our handle is @palantir. Have a great day!

In this week’s episode of The Secret Sauce, Senior Designer Ashley Cyborski discusses our iterative design feedback process and how this helps move designs forward to effectively meet our clients’ ideal results. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a short piece of advice to help your business run a little bit better. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today we’re talking with Ashley Cyborski about a good design iteration and feedback process. Ashley Cyborski [AC]: Hi everyone, My name is Ashley Cyborski and I’m a senior web designer here at Palantir. You may remember my other podcast about the benefits of designing in the browser. You should check that one out if you’re a web designer feeling hesitant about taking the leap to HTML and CSS. Today, though, I want to talk about our design feedback process here at Palantir, because it is a bit different than traditional design processes. I’d like to rewind and give you a bit of background. At Palantir we use agile methodologies during our development process. For anyone unfamiliar, agile is a 2 week cycle called a sprint where you prioritize work, complete those tasks, present the work to the client, and receive feedback which you can then incorporate into the next sprint. It is a process of continual improvement and collaboration. Our design feedback process came out of a desire to incorporate that same level of collaboration and continual improvement into the design phases of a project. After a lot of thinking, and quite a bit of inspiration from a webinar by Dan Mall, we came up with a process that is iterative, but accommodates our clients’ needs.  The process isn’t perfect and we are continually working to improve it, but it is a huge improvement from where we were just two years ago. The core principle of our design feedback process is iteration. Though this sounds pretty obvious, it is very different than the traditional design feedback and iteration cycle. In a traditional process you present your work, receive feedback, incorporate that feedback into the design that you had presented, and then re-present your work, around and around until the client decides to approve the design. And though that works quite well for print design, it is counter intuitive to web design, especially when paired with an iterative development process. In our feedback process we often tell our clients to think about moving designs forward. At the start, we present 2 to 4 style tiles to the client. Then, we ask them to choose the “most correct” one to move forward with. The one they chose may not be perfect yet, but through iteration and with the proper input, we move the design closer and closer to that “ideal”. In order to get there, we need that input. We ask our clients to provide feedback on the chosen style tile and the discarded ones. We prompt with questions like “What did you like about this design?”, “What don’t you like about this design?”, and most importantly, “Why?” Our goal is to understand our client’s thoughts and feelings, including what is inspiring them and what is concerning them. We take all that feedback and the selected direction, and begin on the first static comp. We don’t spend our time iterating on the selected style tile.  At this point we repeat the process with static comps. The feedback received during the comp phase is worked into the prototype. From there on out, the prototyping process syncs up with the sprint cycle, and feedback on prototypes is defined and prioritized along with the remaining design tasks and incorporated on a sprint by sprint basis. That was a lot of words to describe how we move the design process forward. You might ask, why don’t we work on one deliverable until it is “perfect” or close to perfect? Well there are a few driving factors. First, our process becomes faster and more efficient because we don’t have to pause the project to work out small, inconsequential details that would otherwise resolve themselves in the future. The entire project doesn’t pause until we get it to some subjectively “perfect” state of design. This is important and unique to web design, because your design will appear on any number of machines, browsers, screen sizes, and with multiple variations of changing content over the course of its life. A website is a living, breathing, changing thing. Second, we can adjust the course of our design as the project moves forward and develops. We aren’t stuck with a decision we made in week 1 of the project, when we learn something new in week 7. Development prioritization can drive design prioritization and the design benefits from active and informed developer feedback and input. This benefits the designer, because we aren’t completing work that ultimately will not be implemented, and benefits our clients because they aren’t paying to design work that ultimately won’t be implemented. Third, we get to the browser faster which benefits both the client and the project. I track some of these in a blog post about designing in the browser, but I’ll recap the main points here. Clients tend to understand designs better once we get into the browser because they are more realistic and interactive which helps clients provide better, and more relevant feedback. In browser designs also foster more productive communication and collaboration with developers and reduce duplicated work. Additionally, designers have more control over the final, implemented design. Finally, and possibly most important to the feedback process, it is easier to implement feedback and iterate on the design system in code than it is across multiple page comps. The feedback changes are instant, consistent, and more efficient. Ultimately, this means that the client is able to provide more realistic and relevant feedback, which can be implemented and iterated on faster and more efficiently, all while the design process flexes and flows with development’s needs and prioritizations. I think I’ve outlined a lot of the benefits of our forward moving design process, but I should caveat that we are still iterating on this process to make it even more efficient and effective. One of the major gaps in this process right now is client education and buy in. It is often hard to convince a client, with little to no experience with web design, to adjust their preconceptions about the design approval process. It is also hard to get buy in, for example, that the homepage static comp does not have to be “perfect” in order to move onto the next deliverable. Clients fear that their feedback will be lost or forgotten or that it isn’t being taken seriously, when they do not see it implemented immediately. Clients often tend to be relatively uncomfortable moving forward with something that is not “Approved” or finalized for these exact reasons. One way we try to counteract that is with documentation, making sure we track and the requests changes and tickets. It is up to the designer to communicate as best we can the benefits of this process to our clients upfront. I really believe that ultimately a client gets a better, more flexible end product when using this process. I’d love to hear other’s experience with a similar process. Whether it is an issue you’ve run into and solved, or just with your own experience with a similar process as a client or designer. Leave a comment on this post or tweet to me @AshleyCyborski. AM: Thanks for listening to this edition of The Secret Sauce. You can find more great tips on our brand spanking new website at palantir.net, and you can also find us on twitter @palantir. Enjoy your day!

On this week’s episode of The Secret Sauce, Joe Allen-Black and Luke Wertz explain how Project Stewards use a collaborative process to help our team fully understand and meet our clients’ business objectives and goals. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hi everyone, and welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a quick bit of advice to help your business run a little better. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager, and today we’re talking about Project Stewardship with Joe Allen-Black and Luke Wertz. Luke Wertz [LW]: Hello, I am Luke Wertz. I am an senior engineer and a team lead here at Palantir. Joe Allen-Black [JAB]: Hi, I’m Joe Allen-Black. I’m a project manager and a strategist here at Palantir. LW: So today we wanted to take a few minutes to talk about this concept of project stewards that we have here at Palantir. When we’re planning out a project and planning for a project’s success, one of the first things that we do is try to identify individuals within our project team who will be responsible for ensuring a project’s long-term success, from the very beginning all the way through completion of the project. JAB: What we want to make sure is that the success is defined not only by the fact that the website does everything that they hope and want it to do, and we’re able to feel great about the work that we can do, but we also want to be sure that we’re doing it within the budget constraints, within the time constraints, within whatever kinds of issues happen to be coming in — we want to make sure that we’re making the best site for all the different situations that we have. LW: Yeah, exactly. We have come to this point of trying to identify two people to do this, from a long history of only having one person that tried to embody this from the beginning of a project to the end. And that person ended up going through some unusual changes during the course of a project, needing to wear many different hats: the business analyst hat, sometimes just having to refer to that person as an analyst, sometimes as an architect, sometimes as a technical lead, sometimes as a team lead — it got to be a bit much. And it was oftentimes difficult to transition well from the strategic planning parts of a project, that typically happen quickly very early on, and then into architecture and technical implementation. So we identified that this need arose to have two people playing this part on a project, and to work as a balance and counterbalance for each other. JAB: What we’re ultimately trying to do is make sure that throughout the process our clients understand why we’re coming up with solutions, why we’re coming up with suggestions, as to how we can best work with them. And during the types of projects that Luke and I are on, part of my role would be to go through and determine some of the different features, some of the different ideas that we want to have the site include. And then, working with Luke, I’ll try to help facilitate the best way we can implement those in maybe the best order for those. The technical side is left to smarter folks like Luke to figure out, obviously. And then we try to make sure that together that the options are the highest-quality technical answer that fits within the constraints we have on the project. LW: That’s exactly right. We spend a lot of time talking about what our client’s business objectives are, and their goals. And where I really rely on somebody like JAB, or somebody in JAB’s position, is to really have a deep understanding of the client’s KPIs and what those might look like in practice. And having somebody who is a co-worker and colleague who does that, and not being reliant on a client stakeholder to do that for me — it allows me to workshop ideas and to architect these incredibly huge, sometimes overly complex — some might be so bold to say, over-engineered solutions, and have a friendly face telling me, nope, go try again. JAB: It’s friendly sometimes, you know, depending on the type of project [laughs]. LW: It’s always done in love [laughs]. JAB: We want to make sure that, when we come back to our clients and make a recommendation, we’ve been able to talk and that we understand the vantage points of both of us, and that we’re able to go, considering what we want to do. We know that we should spend a bit more time on making sure your workflow is the best, because that’s a pain point to you, and we might do that rather than spend a lot of time on some other part of the project. Or depending on the project it might need to be made sure that speed is in there, or that there’s something else that needs to be enhanced, and that might have to come at the expense of spending time on something else. What Luke and I are able to do is to make sure that we’re really keeping each other in check, and then we bring back the best possible options to our clients, to make the ultimate decisions on how they want to spend their budget and want to spend their time, but knowing that they’ve got great feedback from two folks looking at it from different vantage points. LW: So what this looks like in practice for us is, starting from the first inkling of a project, when we’re still just in the very early stages of talking with a client about the potential of what they want to build, we will assign two people as a strategist and as a technical lead. And it is their job to be involved from the very first conversations we have about the actual production of a site to sit in together and to hear the same things from their own unique expertise, and to be able to hear from the clients and the many stakeholders that are often involved in those early conversations, so that we can fully encompass both the business needs and the technical needs that may be constraints or desires on the project. So we start this process early on, and build a very collaborative process where we’re checking in very frequently, we’re documenting separately the things that we hear, and then bringing our notes together and making sure that we’re hearing the same thing and are able to capture the same vision for what the final product is going to be. JAB: Then throughout the beginning of the process I might be introducing different concepts for how we want to organize our data, how we want to have different pieces of the site speak to different audiences, while Luke is giving ideas on how we would structure that data, how we would be able to put that in a way that, at the end of the day, somebody’s going to be able to see that on the Internet or whatever type of tool that we’re building. And as that continues going on, we work with our client to get to the best ideas. As his team keeps working through the development, my goal will be make sure that I’m able to follow up, can take a kind of different view of it, gut-checking, to make sure it’s working the way we were expecting and for the right goals. LW: So we’re both definitely involved from the beginning and throughout. But the place where our two separate disciplines and our mutual responsibilities as stewards on a project intersect is at the data model layer, which is a very developer-y buzzword. That’s my word, not JAB’s. But the output of our data model is typically a complete definition of all of the pieces of information that are going to be on the project, and what those pieces of information encompass. And so Joe has worked very hard up to that point to get a full understanding of the individual pieces of information that are necessary to meet the goals and KPIs of the project, and I’m working alongside him to define reasonable ways of storing those pieces of information in a well-defined database and data structures. And so the output of that process is a data model that the development team can then use to begin layering interactions and relationships, and begin to see the vision of the full thing come to fruition. JAB: It’s definitely measure twice and cut once. So we’ll spend a lot of time talking about, what are the types of pages that we need, what are the types of elements, and then how do we break that into fields and how do those relate. So I will be talking with the client or with the people that we’re working with, and saying, hey, we really need a categorization that helps us bucket these items together. Or Luke will take that, and using a term like ‘data modelling’, turn that into what that’s going to look like on the back end, and how can we be sure that we don’t blow up the element by putting a bunch of code out there. So we’re able to have that approach in two different ways that ultimately hits that goal. LW: At the end of the day, what we want to make sure is that any client we’re talking to, any client that we’re working with and trying to build a project for — we want to make sure that we have the right people around the table or the Google Hangout, as the case may be to make sure that we’re hearing correctly and exactly what the client needs. Because it’s not until we can fully understand what the client needs that we can build for them exactly what they want. So that’s really the role of the project stewards: it’s to be there at every moment of the project to ensure that we’re hearing and we’re listening and we’re responding appropriately. Thank you very much. JAB: Thank you. AM: Thanks Joe and Luke. That’s the end of this week’s Secret Sauce. For more great tips, check out our website at palantir.net, and check us out on Twitter. Our handle is @palantir. Have a great day!

On this week’s episode of The Secret Sauce, we are joined by guests Kirsten Burgard and James King, organizers of Drupal GovCon. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hi again everyone, and welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a quick bit of advice to help your business run a little bit better. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager, and today we have a different Secret Sauce. Ken Rickard, our Director of Professional Services, recently attending Drupal GovCon in Washington DC in July, and got to sit down with two of the organizers: James King from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Kirsten Burgard from the US Department of State to chat about this annual Drupal event. So they are going to share what this event is about, and why you may want to check it out next year. All right! Take it away Ken . . . Ken Rickard [KR]:  This is Ken Rickard. We’re at the Palantir Secret Sauce podcast. This is our broadcast from Drupal GovCon, and we’ve invited two of the organizers to join us today: we’re with Kirsten Burgard and James King. Kirsten Burgard [KB]: Yay! Welcome to Drupal GovCon. KR: Thank you. This is I think my third or fourth . . . it used to be Capital Camp, and it’s now GovCon. This is the second year I’ve been here at the NIH, I know that. So tell me, how did the two of you get involved in this event? KB: Well, it started . . . this is all really Tim Wood’s fault. He’s at the Department of Commerce. And he thought it would be really great if we all got together and started to do events, mini events where we could share information. The very first event one we did we had thirteen people. Then we decided to hold a larger event as a government-focused one at Commerce, and that was 2012. KR: Yes, I was there, KB: Yeah, we killed the wifi before 8:00 in the morning [laughs]. I had never seen that before. We thought we’d get about 200 people. We had 330. And at that event James approached me and said, “Hey, what about NIH hosting it?” And I thought, ‘this is never going to happen. Who at NIH is really going to make this happen?’ And it’s been James for three years now. James King [JK]: So I did go to the Commerce event, and I had started using Drupal since 2010. When I got hired here in 2009, they gave me a project that hadn’t been started, and they bought this thing called Drupal and had a server, and I knew nothing about Drupal so I was learning on my feet Drupal 6. And I started playing with it and really liked it, and wanted to learn more about it. Found out about the Commerce event and that, like what was there, but saw how cramped it was. KB: [Laughs] JK: And wanted to get involved, and also selfishly wanted to be able to get more exposure at NIH on Drupal. I work for the NIH Library . . . the internal research library for NIH . . . and one of the things that we’re trying to do is foster community in different areas. And since I have a technology background, I’m trying to encourage use of technology across NIH. And Drupal being one of the things we’re working on, we were trying to encourage more people to know about and use Drupal. So it made sense to at least try to have an event at our place. Since then obviously this has continued to grow, and we now have user group meetings as well just for NIH people. And those are growing as well. KR: Yeah, the GovCon is a little bit of a special event of all the ones that I go to. Most of the ones that I go to are regionally-themed, but this one is industry-themed, or in this case, government service. KB: Yeah. KR: Public service themed. So, I mean, what are the goals of the whole idea? What are we trying to accomplish here? KB: Well when we started doing DrupalGov . . . it’s actually called Drupal For Gov . . . we really just wanted to make it possible for government practitioners in open source communities to get together. Drupal just had the largest influx of folks within government. We also have Linux people, Wordpress people, Joomla people. We have a wide cross-section of open source CMS’ mostly, and some back-end things. And our primary goal was to make it possible for government employees to get access to the information they needed. Whether it was training, or collaboration, or even just innovative new thoughts and processes. Oftentimes in government we’re very stove-piped. We don’t collaborate, we don’t cross sections. We don’t . . . even within my old agency, Department of Veterans Affairs, one section didn’t talk to the next section. It’s very confrontational almost between offices. So to make an organization like ours, which started with 11 people, to an event that now has over 1,000 people attending, is pretty weird [laughs]! It’s just pretty darn weird. JK: So as a librarian geek or information professional, information architect, I very much embrace the idea of open source, but also government use. The government spends a lot of money with contractors developing themes, developing modules, so forth, at a minimum I wanted to try and bring together the NIH people to be able to share that. To not only share the products, the deliverables, but to share lessons learned, to share the modules they’re using, tips and tricks, to come together on training, and so forth. Drupal GovCon was an easy way to foster that. Having it here on campus made it very easy for the NIH people to come, but we’re also trying to be a sharing, open environment, so we’re making it as broadly available as possible. That’s why we continue to try to keep it to be free so that any level person, whether they’re a budding sysadmin, or developer, or a UX person, we’ll be able to come and learn. KB: And we’ll have something for them too. We have sections that aren’t just like the regular “here are the tracks,” but actually sections across the board, and on top of that, additional training too. KR: Yes, it’s a very interesting lineup. You have a very diverse speaker group, and very diverse attendee group. It’s interesting too, a lot of the Drupal events are weekend events . . . this is during the week. And so it’s almost a professional event. I think that’s fascinating too. So based on the success we’ve seen from the last few years, I was at the Commerce event, what are you hoping to see next year? KB: So next year might be a little bit more difficult because like I said, we’re over 1,000 now. Our attendee drop is nowhere where it needs to be on a free event. So typically a free event will have like a 50% drop in attendance over registration. Ours hovers at less than 40%. That makes it much more difficult for us to gauge how many lunches to buy, how many cups of coffee we need . . . we ran out of coffee yesterday morning an hour into coffee service, and we bought 800 cups! We ran out of lunches really close to the very end, so it wasn’t as like a lot of people had to go buy lunches. I believe we ran out of lunches again today, but not badly . . . only a couple. JK: No, we were pretty close. The auditorium seats 500. KR: And that’s the biggest space we have available. KB: Yeah. And what we do through the day is we flux space everything. So we try to  tell all the attendees, “Please, refresh your screens. Sessions will move.” And they do. And sometimes speakers forget where they’re supposed to be. JK: I appreciate and I expect that we’ll continue to have that diversity as highlighted in our keynotes. The first day keynote was challenging attendees to really look at diversity and bias that’s in the industry, and how do we step back and address that. Today was more of a practical on how do we practically move an agency top-level site to Drupal. And tomorrow . . . KB: Tomorrow it’s all security. We actually have the keynote from Velocity from last year, Laura Bell, who is a security expert from New Zealand. So I’ve had all kinds of fan boys come up to me and say, “oh my god, how did you get Laura Bell?” and I’m like, “I asked.” [laughs] KR: That might be the lesson for folks to takeaway from this episode of the podcast is sometimes all you have to do is show up and ask. KB: Yeah. Show up and ask. It works really well. KR: All right. Thank you both for joining me. KB: Thank you. AM: That’s the end of this week’s Secret Sauce. For more great tips, check out our website at palantir.net, and check us out on Twitter. Our handle is @palantir. Have a great day!

In this week’s episode of The Secret Sauce, Director of Professional Services Ken Rickard gives an overview of his upcoming webinar that outlines the components that go into successful web projects. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hi again everyone, and welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a quick bit of advice to help your business run a little bit better. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager here, and today’s advice comes from our Director of Professional Services, Ken Rickard. He has some thoughts on why web projects succeed: how to do proper planning and how to consider all the components of a project. A heads-up that he talks about a webinar he’s hosting on this very topic on Wednesday July 27th, but in reality we moved it to Thursday July 28th (the next day)! So be sure to join our mailing list on our website at Palantir.net, or email me at manley@palantir.net to get the information and get the link forwarded your way. All right! On to Ken . . . Ken Rickard [KR]:  Hi I’m Ken Rickard, I’m the Director of Professional Services at Palantir.net, and on the 27th of July [NOTE: moved to the 28th of July] I’ll be doing a webinar called “How Web Projects Succeed” in which we’ll take a look at how you plan, and then later execute, a project from end-to-end. And we’ll be looking at specifically all the different components that you need to be thinking about in terms of strategy and budget while you’re planning to do your next project. So what we like to do is walk through all the necessary steps that are required in order to really get a firm grasp on the goals of the project: how you’re going to measure your success towards those goals, how you’re going to articulate those goals to your internal stakeholders, we’ll talk about how you develop personas and other understandings of your audience, how you use those to inform your design, and use those again to do some testing around those designs to make sure you have good information architecture. We’ll talk about content, in particular we’ll talk about content audits and content strategy, so that you understand how your message gets across in terms of your CMS architecture, but also workflow and all the other little bits and pieces that go into making a successful editorial experience. So what I think you’ll find for people who don’t do . . . who aren’t in a web firm like ours who do dozens of projects in a year . . . you’ll find there are lots of little nuances and details that if you’re not planning for them, they will catch you by surprise. And if you’re not prepared for those surprised, you’re going to have a difficult time adjusting as the project moves on. It’s a fairly informal talk, but we do drill into, “here are the things we know are going to happen, here’s what we advise are best practices, and here’s how you ought to be budgeting for things.” A good example would be if you’re not budgeting for quality assurance testing, what are you going to be missing out on? If you’re not budgeting for long-term support . . . it’s fascinating the number of people we run into who have a budget for getting a new site designed, but then have no budget for Year 2 or Year 3, thinking, “well once we do this, it will be done.” And that’s just not the way the web works! We’ve all been doing this for a very long time, and understand that the web is a dynamic medium, and the thing you just finished isn’t complete. There are just waypoints along the road of sort of ongoing marketing and development and things like that. So you are always in a position to want to make changes. You’re always in a position to want to publish new things. And in order to do that, you need a long-term maintenance strategy. It’s interesting . . . I was talking to a client recently, and we had a very long conversation about how we could help them on their project. And it was interesting to me because I think they were looking for a technical answer. They were expecting me to give them a technical answer. And I said, “the three biggest things we can figure out for you right now are: what’s your editorial workflow? Because you’ve got 300 people stretched across 10 different departments who right now pass around Word documents in email. Then they go into the CMS and they go online. That’s Number 1. Then Number 2 is what’s your governance plan going to be? And your governance plan is something that, again, people often overlook. And that’s about who can make what edits to content on the web, who has to approve it before it goes live, when does it expire, things like that. And your governance plan, along with your workflow, really dictate a lot of the architecture to how the CMS has to be built. In some cases it dictates which CMS you need to use, as some do things in one way and some in another. And the third thing we talked about . . . again, I think they were expecting me to say, “here’s some technical expertise” . . . and the third question was: what’s your maintenance capacity? Because again, this was going to be a very large project for a number of different departments stretched across a number of different agencies. And they have a staff of six people! So we could architect the greatest solution in the world, but if they can’t maintain it, then it’s not going to be a successful project. So we use those kinds of metrics when we’re talking about success. What does it actually mean two years on? Three years on? After the initial project is done? How are you going to support it, how are you going to interact with it? How are you going to make changes as you go? Those things are critically important. We’ve done very successful projects where the budget constraint meant we couldn’t do the architecture that was recommended, so we had to go with alternative methods in order to keep the budget under control. We’ve done projects where we’d like to do a certain architecture, but they only have a staff of two, and the staff of two can only maintain certain things. So if you understand going in all the different things that have to happen on a project, which is again what we’re going to be covering, these kinds of questions become much clearer, and much easier to answer. And that’s something I think we really enjoy as a company . . . I’m not the only one . . . everyone at Palantir really likes digging in and doing that kind of collaborative problem solving. That is easier to do when everyone knows, ok, these are the puzzle pieces, these are what we are trying to fit into a successful project. And I would leave with this one thought, which is the big question I always like to ask people when we’re kicking off a project . . . and you can think about when going into this kind of session is: six months after your project is done and the new site is launched, what will you consider success to be? Typically we find people who are focused on one or two aspects on the project, and they may not be the right one. Sometimes people are fixated on budget, sometimes people are fixated on hitting a deadline. And that’s generally not enough because the things that are driving those budgets and deadlines generally have business goals attached to them. So you have to know, well, really we’re driving to have this project done by the end of November so that we can hit the big conference that we’re throwing, and then we’re hoping to increase our membership 20% in the three month after that conference. That’s the kind of thing that you need to be able to come into a web project being able to articulate. Because that’s what’s going to drive the design and the development of the project. So understanding when you’re hiring a firm to do an end to end project like that you’re not just hiring, as we say in my house, you’re not just hiring us to lift the couch and put it where you want it. You’re hiring us to do the interior decoration, the interior design as well. And to do that we need to know what kind of living space do you want? What kind of tasks are you trying to accomplish? What kind of business goals are you trying to accomplish? Like I said, that’s a whole lot to swallow! But I think we can actually do it. It’s a 45 minute session, and it’s free to attend. Go ahead and sign up, and we’ll be happy to see you on the 27th. {NOTE: moved to the 28th] AM: But remember, it’s been moved to Thursday the 28th! That’s the end of this week’s Secret Sauce. If you’re interested in attending Ken’s webinar on Thursday the 28th, please go online to palantir.net/webinar. Hope to see you there. Have a great day!

Web projects are a lot to manage, and that fact doesn’t change after launch. A dedicated support team can help keep things running smoothly and securely. Client Success Manager Cynthia Philpot goes over all of the services our support team can provide to make sure your project is a success, no matter the size. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hi again everyone, and welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a quick bit of advice to help your business run smoother. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from Cynthia Philpot, our Client Success Manager. Cynthia handles support for our clients, which is such a critical component of any website. Because once a site is finished, it still needs continuous maintenance and upgrades. She will be talking about the support services that we offer here at Palantir and how we can assist with your support needs. Cynthia Philpot [CP]:  Hey Allison! Among the many other services that Palantir.net has to offer — like web strategy, consulting, designing and building some very cool websites, we offer ongoing client support.   Whether you are transitioning into our Support department from an ongoing Palantir project, or if you are looking for an experienced company to support your existing website, we can address your needs. As the Client Success Manager here at Palantir, I am the ongoing point of contact for all of our customers in Support.  Based on a relationship built on trust we interact on a regular basis to ensure enhancements, features, and other project needs are addressed. The services that we provide in support are many. We like to begin with a site audit. The site audit is essentially a snapshot of your site. We do a technical review of the site, looking at things like the architecture, build, security — just to name a few. We then provide you with an audit report and walk you through the site findings. We provide information and recommend solutions about any urgent needs that we uncover and make short and long term recommendations to provide a roadmap for next steps. We can do the work for you if you like, or we can do a consulting or training engagement should you decide to do the work yourself. This is really beneficial for a number of reasons for a variety of different people based on their individual skill set levels and desired outcomes. You will have unlimited access to our ticketing system, which our support team will monitor, evaluate, and use to respond to your requests. Be it a bug-fix, issue, or question, we will assign an experienced engineer to provide one-on-one assistance and work with you until the request is resolved. We do security updates because keeping your site secure is at the top of our list. We check weekly for any security updates that may affect your site, and we’ll keep you informed on the progress and ensure the update is done in an expedient manner. We can maintain a standing relationship with your hosting provider. So based on your specific issue and provided we have access, we gladly manage the relationship between you and your hosting provider on your behalf. We have standing relationships with most of the largest providers, and can assist in providing clarity when you receive important notifications and alerts. I mentioned earlier that we perform a site audit but we also provide a Google Analytics audit to identify proper tagging, custom event tracking, goals, conversions, and any other customizations aside from a basic install. As I mentioned early on, whether you need assistance maintaining a current site or perhaps needing to onboard a new employee, we can provide training to fit your specific needs. Palantir provides training and consulting in a variety of formats. Teaching is an integral part of our work. We provide support for Drupal sites as well as other types of sites like WordPress too. If there are additional questions, I am available to provide answers and discuss pricing. Just give me a call. Thanks! AM: That’s the end of this week’s Secret Sauce. For more great tips, please check out our website at Palantir.net. You can also follow us on twitter at http://twitter.com/palantir. Have a great day!

Sales and marketing tactics can complement each other well when used collaboratively. Learn how Palantir intertwines the two disciplines to better understand (and reach) clients. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hello and welcome to The Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is a short podcast where we offer a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from Alex Brandt, who talks about how to combine sales and marketing. Alex Brandt [AB]: A lot of people think of sales and marketing as two separate entities, but the truth is they can both benefit greatly from working together. At Palantir, our sales and marketing efforts are strongly intertwined, and we have found this approach to be extremely effective. For starters, sales helps marketing by informing content. Most often, clients have their first direct interaction with a company by communicating with the sales team. That means the sales team is hearing firsthand what new clients are looking for, what their goals are, what pain points they are dealing with, and ultimately what they think will make their project become a success. The sales team also has a good view into what kind of clients are reaching out. For instance, we have seen a shift in what roles are involved in managing a website redesign. While we used to interact with mainly Directors of IT and other similar technical roles, we now see a lot of marketing teams heading up these kind of projects. This valuable information helps inform what kind of content we should be producing. If we are speaking with more marketing folks than technical, and they are coming to us with new problems and goals, the kinds of resources we are providing for our clients should reflect that. And if this trend shifts again, our sales team will be the first to let us know so we can pivot and adjust. In turn, marketing helps sales by providing a gateway for conversation. Now that the sales team has helped clue us in on what kind of content we should be producing, our marketing team gets to step in and create compelling resources that make people want to work with us. These resources get distributed across different channels and open a path to conversation with sign-up forms for free consultations, newsletters, and webinars. But most importantly, an open and collaborative approach gives all team members the context to keep messaging consistent. Whether it is coming from a blog post, an introductory phone call, or a presentation at a conference, the message a brand is communicating needs to be consistent and in line with what your clients are searching for. Clients want to know that they are being heard and understood, and by keeping a fluid conversation between sales and marketing, this can be accomplished. AM: Thanks Alex! For more business tips, or more information about Palantir, please visit our website at Palantir.net, or follow us on Twitter at @palantir. Have a great day everyone!

Typography is a huge and critical component of the Web. So what do you need to know about web fonts for your site? Designer Michellanne Li goes into the details. TRANSCRIPT AM: Hi again everyone, and welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a quick piece of advice to help your business run smoother. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from one of our designers Michellanne Li, who is going to talk about web fonts. ML: Hello, my name is Michellanne, and I am a designer here at Palantir. Today, I am going to talk to you about web fonts: what are they, and why do you need them? How do you select fonts and implement them on your website? In the early days of the internet, browsers could only render a handful of typefaces, 5 of which became commonly used. Over time, however, browsers and font files have developed so that we literally have thousands of options when we look to select a typeface for a website. But, first of all what exactly is a web font? According to CreativePro.com: “A webfont is a font file downloaded from a Web server and used by the browser to render HTML text.” The desktop fonts that you use in Word or Photoshop are specifically encoded to be rendered by a computer. Desktop fonts come in the following file types: TrueType, PostScript, and OpenType. However, web fonts are created to be read by browsers. Web fonts come in: TrueType, WOFF, EOT, and SVG. So, from a technical standpoint, you need web fonts if you are building a website because they are specifically encoded for the web. But from a design standpoint, good web fonts have features that make them particularly suited to being read on a screen. For instance, they may have wider letter spacing, heavier strokes, or taller x-heights (which are the relative heights of the lower case characters). All of these result in greater readability on a screen. Users don’t spend a lot of time on each web page, so making smart design decisions is critical in ensuring that your content reaches it audience. According to the User Experience experts at Nielson Norman Group, “the first 10 seconds of the page visit are critical for users' decision to stay or leave. The probability of leaving is very high during these first few seconds because users are extremely skeptical, having suffered countless poorly designed Web pages in the past.” Now that we know what web fonts are and why you need them, let’s talk about the financial and technical considerations behind selecting the right fonts. The following are some guidelines to keep in mind: Free fonts are great! . . . sort of. In 2010, Google launched Google fonts, making hundreds of web fonts available to the public free of charge. To do this, Google has collaborated with designers in exchange for a flat fee and the promise of exposure. Google fonts can be a great option if you are on a really tight budget. However, the following are risks to consider: Unfortunately, Google fonts are not held to any external standards, both from an aesthetic and technical standpoint. Before choosing one, it’s wise to verify if it works in all major browsers. Unlike commercial fonts, many Google fonts do not come in a range of weights or styles, such as italics. Due to the Chinese government’s censorship of Google, Google fonts do not work in China. If you have an audience in China, this is important. Websites with Google fonts not only load slowly, they may appear “broken.” Although workarounds exist, they all come down to finding a different source for fonts. Some of the latest sources are Chinese services that host Google’s fonts on their own servers. Although this probably is not illegal, I would not recommend that clients use a fonts platform that did not pay for its fonts. It is, to say the least, poor form. Free fonts, including but not limited to Google fonts, get enormous mileage both in print and on the web. When it comes to simple classic typefaces, that’s not a bad thing. They are like the little black dresses of typography. But, if you’re looking for a high impact display font to differentiate your website, selecting the same free font that everyone else has already used to the point of exhaustion will have the opposite effect.All of this being said, Google fonts has some real gems and is a solid, budget-friendly option. So, why bother shelling out money for a commercial font? You should purchase a commercial font when the following are your priorities: Quality: Commercial fonts are held to high technical and aesthetic standards. The best typeface foundries put an incredible amount of thought and detail into their work and can answer questions about browser compatibility, usage scenarios, and the history behind each typeface. Brand consistency: If you have an existing brand that includes typefaces for print materials, it’s worth it to purchase the corresponding web fonts. In the event that you are just starting to establish your brand, now is a good time to ask if the typefaces you like have print and web equivalents and to determine how well these potential typefaces work in both kinds of media. When purchasing a commercial font, it is important to read the licensing agreement. Font designers and retailers place constraints on the scope of a font’s usage in order to protect the value of their product. So, at this point, you’ve picked your fonts, and you’re ready to start using them on your website. How does that work? One option is to use a hosting service for your fonts, which means that your font files will reside on the server of the company from which you obtained them, and your website will load those files. For commercial fonts, hosting is a subscription-based service. The advantages of this are: Implementing the fonts on your website is as easy as adding a single line of code. Web fonts get updated as the internet changes and grows. With a hosting service, your provider can push the latest versions of the font files to the cloud server, and they will be automatically loaded onto your website. You don’t need to keep track of the font files. Hosting services offer some great bargains. For instance, Typekit is a hosting service that is bundled into the Adobe Creative Cloud package. For no additional cost, this includes unlimited web font usage for up to 500,000 page views. All of that being said, Typekit isn’t really a bargain if you don’t need Adobe Creative Cloud to begin with.Self-hosting is another option. Self-hosting means that the font files exist on your server. The main advantage of self-hosting is the ability to subset fonts. This means editing the files to remove unneeded characters. Subsetting results in smaller files sizes, speeding up the load time of your website. In summation, web fonts are an important component in creating a website because they are specifically designed and encoded for the web. In selecting fonts, both financial and technical considerations should be taken into account. Once you’ve determined your fonts, you can choose to use a hosting service or to self-host. Even when we’re not conscious of it, typography is a huge part of the web. I hope this talk will contribute to making the web a more beautiful and user-friendly place! AM: Thanks for listening to this week’s Secret Sauce! For more great knowledge, visit our website at palantir.net, or follow us on twitter at @palantir. Have a great day!

It’s hard to know which type of image will best help you optimize your site’s performance. Front-end Developer Patrick Weston breaks down four different image types and assesses the function and benefits of each kind. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hi and welcome back to this week’s Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run a little bit better. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager, and today’s advice comes from front-end developer Patrick Weston, who has some thoughts about dealing with images on the web. Patrick Weston [PW]: Hi, I’m Patrick, and I’m going to be talking about images on the web. The web is really progressing forward and evolving, and as developers we tend to take data and speed for granted. We normally work at businesses and offices with really fast broadband connections, but that might not always be the case for all users. Responsive web design has really focused on mobile first, and a lot of times these mobile users are data capped or have their data limited. And they can also be in remote locations on slow connections. Images are often the largest asset on web pages. So if you make improvements with images, you can really make large improvements with your site speed and performance. I’m going to talk about different types of images, when to use which, and some general tips for improving your site with regard to images. First, I’m going to cover two different types of categories. There are: Lossless vs. lossy compression Lossless as the name implies, is no loss of data. So these are images where the source feed is the exact same as the outcome. But lossy compression allows you to lose some quality at the sake of file size. There are also vector graphics vs. raster graphics Vector graphics are defined mathematically. For example, a line starts here, and ends here 10 pixels over. But Raster is defined pixel by pixel, so you can think of it as kind of a 2D grid with different colors at each pixel.So now I’m going to talk about the different types of images that there are. There are four main types: PNGs JPEGs Gifs and SVGsI’m going to go through each one and kind of talk about their strengths and weaknesses, and then I’ll recap about when to use each type. PNGs are the first type I’m going to talk about. They are a lossless file format, so you don’t lose any quality. And they are also raster, so they are defined pixel by pixel. But the benefit with PNGs is that they have what’s called an alpha channel, so this allows for transparency. If you’re using transparency on the web, it’s likely a PNG. And this alpha channel is a scale of transparency, so it can have different values of how transparent the image actually is. The next are JPEGs. These are kind of the workhorse. This is one of the most common file formats, and it’s a lossy file format, so you can have some loss of quality, but also save image size at the same time. They are raster, so they have a 2D grid of pixels, and they don’t have an alpha channel, so there’s no transparency. The next type are GIFs. They are also lossless and raster. They do support transparency, but it’s  kind of an on/off switch, so the pixel is either transparent, or not transparent. So you do lose some quality here with the transparency. But the main thing that makes them famous on the web is that they support animation. So if you’re looking for kind of a simple animation, GIFs are a good way to go. Last you have kind of a newer file format that’s beginning to be more popular on the web , and that’s SVGs. They are vector graphics, so they are defined mathematically. You have shapes and sizes, different line widths, thicknesses, colors . . . they’re really versatile. These four file formats are kind of confusing, and there are different approaches to when you want to use each of them. So the real key is to kind of figure out what image is best for you. If you need any sort of animation, GIF is the only option. It’s the only one that provides animation without using a video format. If you need any sort of transparency, PNG is probably your best bet because it gives you that alpha channel for transparency that is a nice scale rather than just an on/off like GIF provides. But if you have an image that’s a photo or a scene, a JPEG is probably your best choice. And JPEGs are probably your best choice just by default (unless you don’t want to lose image quality, in which case a PNG is also a great choice). The great thing about JPEGs is that you can set the quality. If you have something that needs to scale well . . . a logo, or something with simple shapes and colors . . . then go with an SVG, because they can have really small file sizes. Other alternatives that you can use include CSS. A lot of times you can do gradients or background images, and you can avoid images all together. Or if you have a logo you can use text or a web font. And there are also some great approaches that are starting to come out, and become more popular, for responsive images. One is called  “Srcset.” It allows you to define different images depending on the width of your browser. There’s also the picture element. And Drupal also has a great responsive image module that’s new in Drupal 8. You set up different images sizes and styles, and then tell Drupal when to apply each. But all of these really depend on having a really good source image to begin with. You can do all sorts of responsive tricks and things. But if your source image isn’t the right type and isn’t optimized, it’s not going to be a good result. There are lots of types of images out there. But with a little thought, and with the help of some new best practices and automation (like Drupal’s new responsive image module), you can create a great, fast-loading site for all users regardless of screen size or internet speed. AM: Thank you Patrick. That’s it for this week’s Secret Sauce! For more great tips, follow us on twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a great one. Helpful links Image types and when to use them: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/image-optimization?hl=en Configuring Drupal's new responsive image module: https://www.advomatic.com/blog/adding-responsive-images-to-your-drupal-8-site

Writing a Request for Proposal (or RFP, for short) is no easy task. You want it to be as detailed as possible, as to ensure you get the right kind of proposal from the right kind of vendor, but general enough since you're not entirely sure what you need – and the expertise of the vendor will help articulate some of that, ironically. So how can you write a better RFP given these circumstances? Our Account Manager Allison Manley has seen hundreds of RFPs come through the door, and shares some thoughts on how to streamline your process and ask the right kinds of questions to get what you need, and make it easier for vendors you actually want to submit a proposal. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to the Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is a short podcast, just a couple minutes, that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better.  I’m Allison Manley, an account manager here at Palantir, and I’m the one offering today’s advice, which is about how to craft an RFP (which stands for Request for Proposal) in order to attract really good responses from firms like Palantir.  RFPs are hard to craft, no doubt. You have to be concise, you likely have to insert a ton of legal jargon, but you want to create an appealing proposal that will attract the right firm for the job. Over the years we have looked at a lot of RFPs, and have seen the good, the bad and the ugly. We thought it would be helpful to share our experience from the responder's side. I’m going to outline the main five things you should consider. There are many more things to consider, and actually I outlined 15 of them in a blog post from March 2016 that is up at Palantir.net. But here are the key five things I think you need to know.  1. Be specific about your desired outcomes and goals When outlining your goals, get as specific as possible. Even if you need just a general upgrade because your site is outdated in both the look and the technology, there must be a reason you’re frustrated with the old site: is it now too slow for back-end users to update? Does it need to be mobile-friendly? Do you want to increase traffic for a specific reason or conversion? Why do you want those things? What will they do for you that your current site can’t? Try to also avoid generalities such as: "We want a website that incorporates social media,“ or “We want more traffic,” and “The site needs to convey our message and mission.” Because guess what: everyone wants those things, and they don’t give us enough information. When outlining projects, make sure to tie outcomes back to specific goals. 2. Give us a budget From a bidder’s perspective, there’s probably nothing more frustrating than asking for a budget, only to be told “we don’t know. We’re trying to figure out how much this should cost.” Let’s face it: there’s a number in your head. I know this because once I hear the basic parameters of the project, I’m going to respond with a range. And based on your reaction, I can get a sense of budget. I’ve had a lot of potential clients describe their needs, to which I’ll respond, “a similar project we did cost in the low six figures.” This is usually followed by a client saying, “oh, that’s fine” or “we don’t have more than mid-five figures to spend.” See, you did have a number in mind! Even if it was your maximum cap. Don’t ask for all the bells and whistles of a Porche-sized project if you know you only have the budget for a small Kia, or some similar car. Giving a budget upfront allows each firm bidding to tell you what they can offer you for your money. Then you can compare expertise and the value offered for your budget, which gains for you a more complete picture of what you're buying. 3. Be specific about constraints and exclusions Are there certain key dates by which you would need your project completed? Are there brand and identity standards that we have to adhere to? What about third-party integrations that need to be considered? Giving us parameters helps us focus on what we can deliver for you. Exclusions help define a project as well. What items will the bidders not be responsible for? Will someone else be in charge of photography and/or content creation? What about hosting and migration? Letting us know what not to bid on will ensure we don’t account for it as an unknown in our estimate. 4. Realize you are buying the process, not just the end product Palantir didn't always work for healthcare clients. It took the trust and vision of our first healthcare client to give us the project to prove that we could. Consider responsive design: prior to 2011, nobody had ever heard of responsive design, let alone build anything for all devices, it just wasn’t done. But the smart firms all made a smooth transition to responsive. Don't necessarily discount a firm because they've never done a project exactly like yours. Instead look for proof that they have related experience, are effective problem solvers, and have the creative and/or technical range required to complete your project successfully. Conversely, the firm that does nothing but your particular type of project is unlikely to give you a solution much different than the one they produced for your competitor last year. Make sure you are dealing with firms that can effectively translate your message to your audience and not a production house offering cookie-cutter solutions. 5. Do not ever ask for spec work Spec work is asking for work done prior to engagement with a client in anticipation of being paid. Never ask for examples of solutions as part of the RFP process. For one thing, professionals are paid for their ideas. Let’s face it: our ideas cost money. But more importantly, any quick solutions that a candidate would come up with before doing the proper in-depth research about your organization's culture and goals would simply be ill-informed and incomplete. Having strategic thinking guide your message is a much better bet than the "throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks so we can get the job" approach. Who wants to hope for a happy accident? In conclusion Writing a good RFP is not easy, I’m not gonna lie. It isn’t! It’s tough to get everything you want distilled down to a few pages (and in some cases impossible, since your organization may require many pages of legal attachments that need to be there). The bottom line: make sure you are clear about what you need and why. Give us some solid parameters from which to work. Tell us what will make the project successful for you. This helps us suggest the best solutions to fit your needs. And leave the possibility open for a conversation with the bidders so they can ask follow up questions in case you missed anything. And if you need assistance defining your project and writing your RFP, call us. We’d be happy to help show you a better way. So that’s it for this week’s Secret Sauce. For more great tips, follow us on Twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a great week, everybody!

Welcome to a new episode of On the Air with Palantir, a long-form podcast by palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s June 2016 and this is episode #5. In this episode Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by our client Justin McGregor from Rhodes College. Allison caught up with Justin at DrupalCon in New Orleans last month, and spoke with him about how his school has implemented Drupal, how we worked together, and how it’s been going since. We'll be back next Tuesday with another episode of the Secret Sauce and a new installment of our long-form interview podcast On the Air With Palantir next month, but for now subscribe to all of our episodes over on iTunes. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Welcome to On the Air with Palantir, a podcast by palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s June 2016 and this is episode #5. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager, and today my guest is a client of ours named Justin McGregor from Rhodes College. I caught Justin at DrupalCon in New Orleans last month, and spoke with him about how his school has implemented Drupal and how it’s been going. I am here with Justin McGregor from Rhodes College. How are you? Justin McGregor [JM]: Doing well, doing well.  AM: We’re in the last legs of DrupalCon 2016, and we’re in the busy lobby of the conference hall in New Orleans. So there’s a little bit of noise behind us, but we will plow through. So tell me a bit about Rhodes College. JM: Who we are and what we do? We are a small liberal arts college nestled right in the middle of Memphis, Tennessee. If you look at a map of Memphis from above, there’s a big ring road that runs at the side, and if you throw a pin in the middle, that’s us [laughs]. We are 2000 students, roughly, 300-odd employees, traditional liberal arts curriculum covering everything from pre-law, pre-med, that sort of thing, all the way down to the study of the classics. We have a Greek and Roman studies department, and right across the quad we have people that are doing pediatric oncology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. So it’s literally all over the map. And I get to support them all [laughs]. AM: Wow. So your college is on Drupal. How did you come to choose Drupal in the beginning?  JM: I’ve personally been an open-source advocate for a very long time. I’ve been in higher ed web work for going on 16 years now, and I’ve worked with a lot of different CMSs, none of which I could really ever evangelize for. They were really good for what they were, but, you know. At my last school I had evaluated Drupal 6 early on, but our CTO was very anti-open source. But I kind of fell in love with it then, and I’m like, one day I’m going to come back, I’m going to be in the right position at the right school to do this, Years elapsed and D7 had come to be a really mature solution, and I got the job at Rhodes. We were coming off of an aged open-text solution and also Sharepoint 2010 pointing internally. Both solutions were long in the tooth and needed to be replaced, and when I came on board, I’m like, yeah, cool, let’s do this thing, but one of my caveats was, we have to give serious consideration to open source and to Drupal specifically. And so during our CMS roadshow we looked at the two leading proprietary higher ed solutions and also to Drupal vendors for hosting and DevOps. And it became clear really early on that for our use case, Drupal was the only solution. AM: Well, great. Thank you for choosing Drupal! JM: I’m glad to be here, believe me. AM: So what does your internal team look like? What’s the composition? JM: It’s largely me. I am the only developer on staff. I work in the communications department, which actually reports to the dean of admission. So from a business perspective I work for our sales team. That being said, I do have an interactive technology manager, who is my liaison to our external services alumni and development departments. And while he’s not a Drupalist, he’s in the guts of the thing every day, doing work on the site in one capacity or another. I’m also lucky enough to have a handful of student workers, including one third-year computer science student, and while they’re contractually limited to only ten hours a week they are a massive help. And also I found out just before I left to come here that one of our vacant positions may be reclassified as a developer. If anyone’s looking for a Drupal development position in Memphis, Tennessee – just saying it’s a possibility [laughs]. AM: So you did hire Palantir, just to be transparent about things. You hired us for consulting a few times a week to support your team. What was it that you needed from us? What was it you needed to complete the project? JM: Okay, there were two projects. Let’s do them chronologically. The first one was, we’re relaunching our flagship .edu, and while I’ve been in web work for a long time, I was new to the practice of building a Drupal site. And so I knew what I wanted to accomplish, but I would go to Contrib and, here’s all the modules that are available, I could go do this by modifying a template file, or any number of things. But I needed best practices, I needed best solutions. And you can go watch training videos all day long, but they’re around the piece of technology or the specific use case that may or may not actually be the use case you’re dealing with at the time. So having somebody – the structure that I loved was, we would start the week with ‘here’s the problem of the week’. Here’s the piece of functionality that I’m going to be building. Let’s talk through all the possibilities for how this problem could be solved, and arrive at what the best practice is for this use case. And then I’d take a couple of days, get in there, work on it, build it out, and at the end of the week – nine times out of ten, it was done, but if it wasn’t, we could come back and say, here’s the specific problems I ran into, how do we work through that? The metaphor I kept using was, we ate the elephant one bite at a time [laughs]. I had six content types, a whole ton of media assets, and, ooh, I think we ended up moving about 7000 pages, a piece at a time. We took this fairly massive implementation over the course of a couple of months, and built out the framework to handle it all, and just started shovelling in the content. AM: And what was the second project? JM: So I said a minute ago that we had the open-text that was the CMS for the public-facing part of our site at the time, and also an internal SharePoint 2010 set of publishing sites. So support for that is going away, and we needed a solution, and I’m like, you know what, I’m not standing up another CMS for this, let’s just go multi-site and do it all in Drupal. But then we have the challenge of standing up branded sites in a hurry for every little department, grant, professor, whatever, that had had a SharePoint 2010 publishing site before this. And so what we worked through was, first of all, building a road-specific installation profile of Drupal, so that out of the box, all of my content types were there, all of the branding was there – there’s the branding they can change and the branding they can’t change, as a site owner. And also the mechanism for site ownership and how that’s going to work. And the second part of that was to automate a good chunk of the deployment, so I can do from the handful of things that I have to do in my DevOps environment to a functioning Drupal site. The last one I set up took me about five minutes, which is not a bad way to go. AM: I don’t know if I’ll have time to do that today, boss, it took me five whole minutes [laughs]. So what were your goals for your site? JM: To drive recruitment, more than anything. We need students. More than that, though, higher ed is generally in the position of having – as much as we say that the mantra of the site is to drive recruitment, and we say that over and over, we have parents, we have alumni, we have the colleagues of our tenured faculty, on and on. Researchers that are coming because of the disciplines we teach and the research that we do. Researchers from around the country want to come see the research that’s being done here, to be able to collaborate, all of this stuff. So ease of discoverability of whatever piece of content that’s relevant to that audience – now that we’ve been in Drupal and been in production for a year and change, we’re really starting to look seriously at personalization. It’s sort of the standard higher ed model to have the audience navigation across the top – you’re a parent, you’re an alumni, you’re a current student, yada yadda yadda. But once you’re in the guts of the site, that just starts to bleed away, you know? And so being able to contextualize information based on what we know about the person coming in is steadily going to become more and more important to us. Part of that to be handled through Drupal and part of that through CRM integrations, with both Salesforce and an admissions-specific product called Slate.  AM: So personalization is next down the road. Excellent. So what was your working relationship with Palantir? What did it look like on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis? JM: So both of the consulting setups were more or less the same. We identified an hour early in the week where we could, you know, bang around what this week’s problem was, and then an hour later in the week, how did it go, staging for next week’s problems, or if something didn’t get done because I had a roadblock or whatever. Both of the guys I worked with were fantastic. Even if we weren’t on a call I could send them an email any time I wanted to, and hear back pretty darn quickly. But a lot of times I would save stuff for the call because it’s just something you need to talk through, or screen share or something. It was nice to have somebody who’s done a lot of Drupal deployments, at the front of the week, to say ‘this is what, given your current level of expertise, you can reasonably expect to get done this week without just absolutely killing yourself’. And to do that knowledge transfer early in the week that says, okay, here’s what you’re going to need to know, if you’re not hip to this, go read this, go watch these YouTube videos, whatever. Then set to the task and we’ll wrap up on the back end. Having somebody who was really expert in these sorts of Drupal deployments helping set your agenda, because I know my goals, I know my organization, but I need to know what is really realistic to do in the product in a given span of time, you know? AM: All right, so let’s start with the bad stuff, the obstacles. What roadblocks did you run into during the course of the project, and how were we able to help you remove those roadblocks? JM: I’m not new to development, I’ve been doing web work for a while, but there are sort of Drupal-specific things that, when you read through the documentation, or at least when I read through the documentation, like the hook system – they seem to work fine in the documentation, but then when you get into the guts of the system, you think, that doesn’t seem like what I just read, or doesn’t behave in the expected way. I had done a lot of front-end development prior to coming to Rhodes, and the Drupal templating system is something wholly different from anything I’d encountered before. I knew how I needed the site to behave, I knew what I needed it to look like, I knew how I needed it to respond, and all of that, but figuring out, do I do this from stacking a bunch of modules in order to handle fences, for example, which I ended up relying on a lot, to sort of get the markup back down to something reasonable and something I can work with and go from there. Or do I just dive off into the PHP and let’s make template files for everything, and that way I’m programmatically controlling markup. We had to come up with a strategy pretty early on and say, okay, for the sake of anybody who ever has to follow in my footsteps, let’s find a solution we like, and move forward with, that’s how we’re going to work. AM: So what was the biggest win over the duration of the project? I don’t know if you have one win per project, or… JM: So many. Seriously, I say that about the theming as a roadblock, but overall, both of these projects from an institutional perspective have been a resounding success. For academics not to complain about something is actually fairly rare [laughs]. That’s not to say that there weren’t people who take exception to, say, font choices, or, is that really the institutional red, it needs to be a little richer – you know, that sort of nitpicky ‘I don’t like this element of the design so I don’t like all of the design’. Overall, oh gosh, as of last week I think we’re 16 sites in, that we’ve launched so far. And yeah, all the designers have been very very happy with the end product, with the authoring experience. I’ve had some requests for new features and I like that my users are passionate enough to say, hey, this is great but here’s how we could make it even better, and to work through these things with me. I’ve got a handful of new content types that people have suggested – as I’ve been rolling out these little multi-site instances, I think that every last one of them could be used across the enterprise. And it’s great to have people that are willing to work with me on this sort of stuff, to come up with these ideas – not just for them. Probably one of the nicer things about being in a small liberal arts college is that they are mindful of the impact any change can have all the way across the organization, because they eat lunch with these people every day, you know? [laughs] So they’ve all been really successful. AM: Fantastic. So the next step you’ve mentioned for yourself, because you don’t really have a team [laughs], moving forward is the personalization piece. Anything else? JM: Well, part of the reason we selected Drupal to begin with was that it allowed us the flexibility to not deploy a site and then sort of be stuck with it forever. I mean, unlike some of the proprietaries, you get the tools that come out of the box and that’s kind of the end of it. You take one of their templates, you skin it your way, and you’re done. We’re looking at some design improvements. We did a complete redesign, this wasn’t just a move of an old design, we started from scratch and rebuilt. So there were design elements that have really worked well for us, and some things that, to use the industry jargon, aren’t converting the way we’d like them to. We’re not getting the traffic draw for some of the elements that the real estate they’re on deserves. So we’re going to take some time with the design team this summer and look at redesigning certain elements, and – I love that my templating architecture is flexible enough that there’s going to be no problem to just drop in there and, it’s all the same entities, it’s all the same data, we’re just presenting it differently. It looks like it’s going to be a fairly painless process. Also, since we’re at DrupalCon, I’m going to mention this. I’ve been at several sessions about paragraphs over the course of the last couple of days, and when I was at DrupalCon LA I went to a session and I was like, hmm, neat idea, maybe when it matures a little bit more – well, apparently it has matured a lot over the course of the last year. Because some of the things I’ve seen people do with paragraphs here are really impressive. So I’m sort of starting to daydream about some of the tools that I may be able to give my content creators, to do a lot more complicated and a lot more interesting things than they are now. There are certain things, the demand of the site and the demand of the brand, that will require us to leave some things static, but I want to give them as much creativity and as much flexibility as I can, to really make their content sing.  AM: Are you going to be able to add to your staff? JM: We’re trying to get a position for another developer, which hopefully will allow me to pull out and do a little more high-level stuff. We’ve also been steadily training more and more of our communications staff to work directly in the CMS and not rely on me or Nick or the student workers to do the layouts and content for them. And again, so far that’s gone really well. Like I said, the reason that I liked what I was seeing of paragraphs and a few of the other sessions is that, as much as I’m worried about user experience for our audience, I’m also worried about user experience for my content creators. I want them to want to work in the CMS, you know? And anything I can do to improve that situation for them – out of the box Drupal’s a great CMS to work with, but there are always ways to make it better. I’m always on the lookout for tools to help make their work better. AM: Isn’t that the thing about the Web, though – you can always make it better. Tomorrow’s another day [laughs]. JM: Exactly. AM: Well, thank you, Justin. I appreciate you taking the time, I know you’re fried – we’re all fried on the last day of DrupalCon – and there’s been a lot of knowledge and alcohol shared [laughs]. So I know everyone’s ready to relax a bit. JM: Next stop for me is the streetcar, I’m going to go to the other end of the French Market and start tchotchke shopping for the kids and hit three or four bars on the way back to the hotel, that sort of thing [laughs]. AM: Well, hopefully you’ll join us tonight at trivia night, and then at sprints tomorrow. JM: Don’t know, I have family here in town so I have some obligations there. But I’d like to put in a hour or so at the sprints and see how it goes.  AM: Well, thank you so much. I appreciate the time. JM: Thank you! AM: Thank you so much for listening. If you want to hear more episodes of On the Air with Palantir, make sure to subscribe on our website at palantir.net. There you can also read our blog and see our work! Each of these episodes is also available on iTunes. And of course you can also follow us on twitter at @palantir. Thanks for listening!

Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by Senior Engineer and Team Lead Bec White who has some thoughts regarding deployment, and why it's so important to do so early and often not only for your internal process but also to help bring a site to life for your clients. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to the Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is our short podcast with a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, an account manager at Palantir, and today’s advice comes to us from Bec White, Senior Engineer and Team Lead, who has some thoughts regarding deployment. Bec White [BW]: My name is Bec White, and I want to talk about deploying early and often On a project, I feel It's important to get deployments running as early as possible. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but my two favorites are not solving problems at the last minute, and bringing the site to life for clients. I mean, number one, I'm not a firefighter. I don't want to solve problems under pressure, I want to solve problems beforehand and then have my team look like wizards later. There's this idea that with Drupal that you don't have to know the target environment, that you just make a drupal site and then you can put it anywhere. But in practice, though, there's always something about the environment that always affects the build: whether it’s the php versions, whether it’s setting up http redirects (on apache vs nginx), whether it’s your single sign on integration, search servers, varnish config, just to name a few. And for the Drupal-specific hosts, there are other things, like how the settings.php file is managed, and where the Drupal root lives in the repository. So always when you run a project on a new environment, there is *something*. You can make as big a launch checklist as you want, but we all know how painful it is to find out these things when you're rolling up on a deadline. But at the beginning of a project, the deadlines are just thin wisps on the horizon. And under a blue sky, it's not so catastrophic, so stressful when drupal barfs errors all over the destination environment where the client can see them. Ok, so at the beginning of a project, maybe we have a "sprint zero" and we get a repository set up, and Drupal is installed, and hey — we put it on the staging environment. Then there's a plain Drupal up there: it has a druplicon and has the bartik theme. And you definitely . . . the project isn’t ending there. Just looking at it, we know that we're going to have to deploy again… and again, and again.  As an engineer, I love systems, and I love repeatable workflows. So at this point if I can put together a workflow that my whole team can use, that my junior developers can use to deploy when I’m out on vacation, something that’s going to be robust across the lifespan of the project — that's going to be really gratifying. And the goal is to make things less error-prone — to run everybody's code through the same tests, to manage the dependencies consistently so they are present on all environments, even to prevent development code from being deployed to production environments. Once we've ironed out the wrinkles in the sprint zero deployment, we can evolve the deployment script as the project continues and there are additional requirements that get added to the build. This is pretty powerful because at this point we have a repeatable deployment. Everything that goes up into this environment, any content and configuration, that anybody does on that staging environment, that little sprint 0 deployment, anything will get wiped away. You can't break anything as a user on this little sprint 0 site. And when you deploy the sprint 1 work, you're bringing the site to life. Clients can go in and take a poke at their new site, and you know what? The sooner we'll get the feedback that is so crucial to aligning our work with our clients' needs, the better. This is why we do agile! This is the part where I get really excited. What’s better than having someone look at your work and say, "oh boy, this is going to be great for us." Or even better, "This field isn't working the way I expected" or "this page has a bug". That sounds like negative feedback, but really the sooner we get that information, the better. Getting that stuff right is foundational for the work we do. Whether we need to explain what we were thinking, fix some code, or reorganize a user interface, it's always easier to incorporate these kinds of fixes earlier in a project. And the only way we’re going to get that kind of feedback is if it’s real to them: if they see it, they can use it, they can interact with it. And production is where it’s going to be real.  I especially love it when a client, someone who is playing the "product owner" role on a project, says, "ooh, let me show this to my marketing director/content author/intern". What this shows me is someone who is invested in the work my team is doing. Someone who recognizes that this project is going to affect the way their organization works. And as an engineer, the only thing better than systems and repeatable workflows is someone who is invested in my work. So, deploying early and often not only lets us avoid doing high-pressure, last minute, environment-related bug fixing, but it also fosters that feedback cycle that lets us respond to clients.  AM: Thank you, Bec. For more great tips, follow us on Twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a wonderful day!

Running a 30-person team is no small feat, and is absolutely a group effort to ensure everyone is happy and healthy. Sometimes those helping hands come in the form of a service rather than a person however. Our Director of Operations Colleen Carroll talks about one such tool, and the positive impact it's had on our company and culture, in this week's Secret Sauce podcast. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to the Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is our short podcast, up to 10 minutes, that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, an account manager at Palantir, and today’s advice comes to us from Colleen Carroll, our who is going to talk about a tool we use in human resources called Bamboo HR. Colleen Carroll [CC]: Hi, I’m Colleen Carroll, the Director of Operations here at Palantir, and today I’m going to talk about Bamboo HR. It’s important to me, as the Director of Operations, to develop a culture within the team where the team is informed, where they feel independent, and they feel empowered. And one of the areas that I think is overlooked quite often in companies is the employee resources side of things. And quite honestly the term is “people operations” or “employee engagement “ . . . there’s a lot of terms for it . . . but all the resources and things that relate to being an employee of a company. In my past, I’ve experienced first-hand what it is to be an employee and be in the dark. The things that often times you’re in the dark about are, “what was that 401k percentage that I had put on my check that doesn’t show up on my check stub?” and, “what are all the things that I can elect to take advantage of, the benefits that the company offers me,” “what does the company think my PTO [paid time off] balance is?” It’s little things, but it’s things that when you’re in the dark about them you start to worry, or anticipate, that something might be wrong, and you don’t know who to talk to about it. And again, having working for a large institution in the past, it wasn’t clear what those services and resources were, and you didn’t know who to talk to, and yet it could be easily answered in a five minute question. So at Palantir I made it my job to be that resource. And it was easy to do for a very long time because we were a small team. And I felt it was important that people could reach out to me and say, “hey, what benefits are available to me, and why is this a good benefit?” But as the company grew, it got harder to be that centralized resource. I didn’t always have the answer right away, which I always liked to do. But more importantly it became a situation where it was inefficient. The amount of time that was needed on my side, as well as the employee side, to understand the benefits before we could even get to a point of asking specific questions . . . and through my little bit of research I realized that there were tools out there that do this. They often call them HRIS systems. APD is a payroll-related system that also does some of this. But all of them felt too big, too large, and didn’t really meet the culture of Palantir.  And one day I came across Bamboo HR. And it’s mission statement, or it’s promise I should say, was that, ‘if you’re in people operations and you have a bazillion spreadsheets out there, then Bamboo HR is the right thing for you.’ And that caught my attention right away, because I had at least 20 spreadsheets to help me manage all the things that related to the employees here at Palantir.  But then there was the big gotcha, and it was, “do you need help managing PTO balances and communicating that to your team?” So I looked into it and, sure enough, that was exactly what Bamboo was able to offer us. And that was the hook! I took on Bamboo to help us manage paid time off (PTO) and to be able to put that information in the hands of our staff so that they didn’t have to come to me. So that in real time, when they were ready, when they had a question, they could find that information themselves.  And what happened after we got Bamboo installed and set up, was that it had a lot more things to offer, a lot of really great things. Stuff that was even more cryptic to find, I think, in a lot of institutions. For instance, what has your salary history been the entire time you’ve been at the company? Or how much am I contributing to these different benefits for my salary, and what does the company contribute? Some other services that Bamboo was able to offer us was a phone directory. The phone directory created an opportunity for individual employees to update their personal information on their own. So it wasn’t on me to make sure that I always had the most current home address, emergency contact, personal phone number for everybody.  Then when it comes to much more secure information, personally identifiable information like social security and birthdate, I never had a really secure way to do that except for the payroll system. But I don’t really want to be logging into the payroll system to figure out when people’s birthday are so I can send them a birthday card! Well Bamboo lets me do all these things in a really easy way, and I can’t tell you how much easier it’s made my job, and I think how much happier it’s made the team here at Palantir, because they can now come to me and say, “hey I’ve been looking over this benefit package,” or, “I’ve been looking over this information and have a couple of questions for you.“ So our conversations are much more informed, they’re much more efficient . . . I’m not wasting their time, and they’re not eating up too much of my time either, and we can get to the specifics and I can be a better resource to them.  But probably one of my more favorite items — well, I should say there are two new favorite items in Bamboo that I take advantage of — one of them is the Job Board. It’s an applicant tracking system for handling people who apply for jobs at Palantir. No longer do I have to go to Palantir.net and log into the system and maintain different job postings. I have a whole dashboard within Bamboo that tracks people who’ve applied for the position, how long I leave it open. It broadcasts it out to different resources out there, whether it be LinkedIn or other things. It allows me to see how we’re faring, how many people have actually looked at the job posting, and how many of them are actually transitioning or converting into applicants, which is awesome. Then I can roll that applicant once we’ve hired them right into the system.  So administratively — at least ten less spreadsheets! Which is pretty great.  But then the real exciting feature that comes with Bamboo has to do with reporting. This is again where a lot of the spreadsheets come in. For tax reasons, for census-related reasons, for different benefit packages . . . there are a lot of forms you have to report back about how many employees do you have, and where do they physically live, and in our case we have people in different states. So what states do we have employes in? How many people are taking advantage of your benefit systems?  And so as we move towards becoming a more diverse company, it’s important that I have patterns and statistics — historical patterns and statistics to look at — to see how are we faring. What did our metrics look like on applicants who applied and came into Palantir and where can we do better? Where can we knock down some of those unbiased . . . sorry, unconscious biases . . . so we can help drive diversity at Palantir? And Bamboo helps me do that quite easily.  In summary, Bamboo has pretty much saved my life, made me be a better Director of Operations, have a better grasp around all of the things that involve being an employee at Palantir, to help the staff become more informed, and it fits very much to our culture here. And being a distributed company, and one that focuses on being a remote-first culture, I can put this information at the fingertips of the team. And then they can reach out to me and ask more specific questions so that I can have a more thoughtful and informed conversation from my side.  AM: Thank you, Colleen. As an employee of Palantir using Bamboo, I have to say it’s pretty great, so kudos to Colleen for the implementation and choice there. For more great tips, follow us on Twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a wonderful day!

Welcome to the Secret Sauce, our short podcast that is typically around 10 minutes long and offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by our peer Jason Pamental, the Director of Design and Technical Strategy at Isovera in Massachusetts. Jason shares his thoughts about typography on the web, and how he got into it in the first place. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to the Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is our short podcast, up to 10 minutes, that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, an account manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes to us from Jason Pamental, the Director of Design and Technical Strategy at Isovera in Massachusetts. I caught up with Jason at DrupalCon, and he wanted to share with you his thoughts on typography on the web.  Jason Pamental [JP]: Hi, I’m Jason Pamental, I work at Isovera, a Drupal shop right outside Boston, Massachusetts, and I’m here to talk about web typography, and kind of how I got into it. Which, interestingly enough to me . . . I think about it when I’m here . . . I actually got into it because of people I talked to at DrupalCon. I started writing about web fonts when TypeKit came out in 2009. Studying graphic design many years ago, I always loved type, but couldn’t ever really do that much with it online. When TypeKit launched, I had already started using Drupal, and I was using TypeKit, and there were no modules. I found somebody had started one and I just got involved in that: I became the co-maintainer. And that was one of my first forays into using, actually getting into the contrib space.  But then it opened up into talking with a bunch of core developers at DrupalCon in Chicago. It was Al Stephan and Matt Tucker, and a couple other people, in a bar of course, at two in the morning. And I figured if I could convince them that web fonts were actually worth implementing, then I should really do something with that. Since then I’ve spoken about at DrupalCons on three different continents, and written a book about it, and absolutely love the way the sort-of art and science of using fonts fits with that same way that Drupal can kind of tie into how an organization works, and how you create websites, and that same sense of . . . that blend of strategy, and design, and technology all kind of in this one big platform. It’s been perfect. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to implement it, and teaching people how to do it and use web fonts and now I get to kind of spread that around with the rest of the technical team at Isovera too, which has been a lot of fun.  One of the things that actually struck me in how to use web fonts well was actually . . . one of the guys from Vox Media was talking about it in a session yesterday . . . he was talking about image performance, and font performance, and ads. One of the things he started talking about with font performance was something that I had actually written about a while ago: it was a way to balance that flash of unstyled text or unseen text when things are loading.  And that actually ties into a great way that Drupal 8 allows you to control the loading of Javascript. So it really comes down to when you’re loading the web fonts, the first thing that happens is the browser sees the listing for the web font in the CSS, and it has to think about whether or not that web font has loaded. Most of the time it hasn’t yet, so the browser default behavior is to not show anything. That’s actually how all the browsers behave now. The problem is that when you have all these other things going on in the loading process of a page from Drupal, if you’re also then waiting for a web font to load, you’re creating a pretty big delay, and it could be a significant delay in actually seeing any content show up on the page.  So the trick is to actually use something called the Web Font Loader, or something like it that will inject a class into the page. You set the font loading to be asynchronous using Javascript, and that’s something you can easily do now in Drupal 8 to control where the font, the script is executing. And in doing so, you get the unstyled text on the page right away by tapping the CSS into this web font loading class. Then you can style that fallback: you can set the line height, the font size, the letter spacing, all through CSS that is sort of scoped to the presence of that WF inactive class in the loading pattern.  And this is something that the guy from Vox was talking about using on The Verge, on the Vox Media site itself . . . it’s a loading technique that is the easiest thing in the world to set up. I actually have it built into a couple of frameworks and a theme that I maintain on Drupal.org called Beep Edition that will give you some pretty simple hooks to try this stuff out for yourself.  So that loading process  . . . getting the text on the screen right away . . . is another one of those ways to achieve better perceived performance and minimize the difference for people when they are loading stuff.  So if you’re interested in checking that stuff out, if you look at the theme that I have up for D7 and D8 on Drupal.org, Beep Edition, it has a lot of that stuff built in.  AM: Thank you, Jason, and so nice to meet you at DrupalCon New Orleans! For more great tips, follow us on Twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a wonderful day!    

CEO and Founder George DeMet shares a continuation of ideas presented at DrupalCon Barcelona with his new talk on the benefits of running a company according to a set of clearly defined principles, which he's presenting next week at DrupalCon New Orleans. It's called Finding Your Purpose as a Drupal Agency. Want to learn more? We have built Palantir over the last 20 years with you in mind, and are confident that our approach can enhance everything you have planned for the web. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to the Secret Sauce by Palantir.net. This is our short podcast that gives quick tips on small things you can do to make your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, an account manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from George DeMet, our Founder and CEO, who as a small business owner knows a thing or two about how to run a company based on clearly defined principles.  George DeMet [GD]: My name is George DeMet, and I’m here today to talk about the benefits of running a company according to a set of clearly defined principles. What follows is taken from a session that I presented last fall at DrupalCon Barcelona on Architecting Companies that are Built to Last.  At the upcoming DrupalCon New Orleans in mid-May, I’ll be continuing this conversation in an all- new session called Finding Your Purpose as a Drupal Agency. If you’re able to attend Drupalcon New Orleans, I hope you’ll check it out. Some time back I came across an article from the early 1970s about my grandfather, who was also named George DeMet. He was a Greek immigrant who spent more than 60 years running several candy stores, soda fountains, and restaurants in Chicago. While the DeMet’s candy and restaurant business were sold decades ago, the brand survives to this day and you can still buy DeMet’s Turtles in many grocery stores. I never really got to know my grandfather, who died when I was 7 years old, but I have heard many of the stories that were passed down by my grandmother, my father, and other members of the family. And from those stories, I’ve gotten a glimpse into some of the principles and values that helped make that business so successful for so long. Simple things, like honesty, being open to new ideas, listening to good ideas from other people, and so forth.  And as I was thinking about those things, I started doing some research into the values that so-called family businesses have in general, and that some of the oldest companies in history have in particular.  The longest lasting company in history was Kongo Gumi, a Japanese Buddhist temple builder that was founded in the year 578 and lasted until 2006. At the time that Kongo Gumi was founded, Europe was in the middle of the dark ages following the fall of the Roman Empire, the prophet Muhammed was just a child, the Mayan Empire was at its peak in Central America, and the Chinese had just invented matches.  At some point in the 18th century the company’s leadership documented a series of principles that were used by succeeding generations to help guide the company.  This included advice that’s still relevant to many companies today, like:  Always use common senseConcentrate on your core businessEnsure long-term stability for employeesMaintain balance between work and familyListen to your customers and treat them with respectSubmit the cheapest and most honest estimateDrink only in moderation Even though the Buddhist temple construction and repair business is a pretty stable one, they still had to contend with a lot of changes over their 1,400 year history. Part of what helped was that they had unusually flexible succession planning; even though the company technically was in the same family for 40 generations, control of the company didn’t automatically go to the eldest son; it went to the person in the family who was deemed the most competent, and sometimes that person was someone who was related by marriage.   Kongo Gumi not only only built temples that were designed to last centuries, but they also built relationships with their customers that lasted for centuries. In the 20th century, Kongo Gumi branched out into private and commercial construction, which helped compensate for the decline in the temple business. They also didn’t shy away from changes in technology; they were the first in Japan to combine traditional wooden construction with concrete, and the first to use CAD software to design temples.  And while Kongo Gumi’s business had declined as they entered the 21st century, what ultimately did them in were speculative investments that they had made in the 80’s and early 90s in the Japanese real estate bubble.  Even though they were still earning more than $65 million a year in revenue in the mid-2000s, Kongo Gumi was massively over-leveraged and unable to service the more than $343 million in debt they had accumulated since the collapse of the bubble, and they ended up being absorbed by a larger construction firm.  Principles are designed to help answer the question of *how* a company does things, and what criteria they should use to make decisions. In the end, Kongo Gumi was no longer able to survive as an independent entity after 1,400 years in business not because of economic upheaval or changes in technology, but because they strayed from their core principles, stopped taking the long view, and went for the quick cash. Companies that want to be successful in the long run need to identify their core principles and stick to them, even when doing so means passing up potentially lucrative opportunities in the short term. Regardless of whether the business involves building Buddhist temples, making chocolate-covered pecans, or building websites, a focus on sustainability over growth encourages companies to put customers and employees first, instead of shareholders and investors. These kinds of companies are uniquely positioned to learn from their failures, build on success, and learn how to thrive in an ever-changing business landscape. AM: Thank you George! George will be presenting his session, Finding Your Purpose as a Drupal Agency at DrupalCon New Orleans on Wednesday, May 11. You can find out more on our website at palantir.net and in the notes for this particular podcast episode.  If you want to see George’s presentation from DrupalCon Barcelona last year on Architecting Drupal Businesses that are Built to Last, you can also find that link in the notes for this episode as well.  For more great tips, follow us on Twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a great day!

How do you build a variety well-rounded content for your site? And is it all working toward a common goal? If it seems disparate, maybe it's time to look at your content development, writing, and publishing as an ecosystem where all parts – big and small alike – have their place and are working together to support that ecosystem. But how does it work? Marketing and Communications Lead Shawn Smith shares his thoughts and provides a framework in this week's Secret Sauce. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to the Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is a short podcast that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, an account manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from Shawn Smith who is going to talk about how content ecosystems can work for you. Shawn Smith [SS]: Hi I'm Shawn Smith, Marketing and Communications Lead here at Palantir.net. Today I'm going to talk to you about the concept of a content ecosystem, and why it might be the right choice for your team and organization with regard to content creation, publishing, and how it dovetails with your overall marketing strategy. This is a big topic, of course, so I'm going to do my best to give you a high level overview of how it could work, without getting too far into the weeds. Think of it as a general framework, with which you can begin to understand how you could use it, and also how to think about the development of your content (including but not limited to content verticals). It also has to deal with your sales and marketing goals, customer personas, and other important considerations, so the assumption going in is that you have some of this articulated. With that in mind, let's start at the beginning: an ecosystem. In biological terms, an ecosystem is a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment, or, in general use, a complex network or interconnected system. The important terms here are community, interaction, network or system, and interconnectedness. And health, but we'll get into that later. I think this concept is particularly useful if you are part of a small marketing team. Here at Palantir, the team is quite small… in other words, it’s just me. I have some help from our account managers, our sales folks, and others. BUT there is a big caveat here regardless of marketing team size, and that is the opportunity for team-sourced content. After all, we have about 25 different people working at different disciplines in the company.  Given that content publishing is hugely important for a service-based company like Palantir for sales purposes, we *must* have a variety of different content types to attract and keep engaged our various audience types (and ultimately lead them to choosing us for projects, of course). We create content about the kind work we do, share insights on new technology, details on events at which we're speaking, how our company operates culturally, job openings, our client's projects, and many other types. And while we work in a variety of disciplines, some, like development and supporting technologies, are quite technical in nature. So we'll use something technical as an example for developing content as part of an effective content ecosystem. But before we talk about content, let's start with the 20,000 ft view of this content ecosystem framework to understand how it operates: It's important to think holistically, and build upon some sort of overarching goal your organization has. What is the goal upon which we can build a foundation for our marketing plan and strategy? We value collaboration and transparency both internally and with our clients at Palantir. And with our 20th Anniversary around the corner, we're focusing on allowing our company values to surface throughout the content we generate. That's a great goal to use an anchor. From there, we think of a supporting theme for the quarter (or any length of time that may work for your organization). This theme could be one of your marketing campaigns. For example, we know that our strategy services in all their forms are incredibly important for our client projects, and can vastly increase the success rate. We'll use this as our supporting theme for the quarter, focusing on strategy services. From here, you can get as granular as you wish. I like to then take the quarterly theme, and break it down monthly and overlay with other targets we want to hit due to an event coming up, a conference, client project launching, or some other kind of happening. You can go further down this rabbit hole, too, breaking down by week or even by day should there be a particularly important sales and marketing opportunity coming up. Now that we have a basic framework, let's get back to content. Earlier we decided to go with something somewhat technical in nature… so how about Drupal 8 as a platform choice for our client projects? It's a big topic, and can inspire content big and small in nature, and that's perfect because every bit of content in the ecosystem has its place; it could be small and fun and, say, community facing, or technical and epic, or somewhere between. Now, let's take a look at Drupal 8 as a content generation concept, with strategy as a theme, and collaboration and transparency as our overarching goal. What content can we develop around this? We could talk about Drupal 8's new features that make it easier for content editors to publish content. That is likely strategically important for our almost all of our clients. But how does this work in Drupal 8? This could be a blog post, a webinar, a downloadable how-to, a podcast, and certainly supported via social channels to point people to this various content. We could also talk about something much more technical in Drupal 8, like how it has REST baked in, or how it plays nice with a suite of PHP technologies out of the box. The question here then becomes: who are we targeting with this content, and where does it fit into our content ecosystem during this time? More specifically, how does it work with our theme? And further, does it hit our target goals? It could, so long as we tailor that content to do so. REST being baked into Drupal 8, not to mention it playing nice with PHP technologies, provides our clients a variety of interesting ways to surface data and interact with external data sources to offer the kind of content and information their audience wants. So we can talk about that generally, or offer a technical whitepaper. We could host a webinar that explains this in a non-technical way to be more transparent about technology. Any many other content types, all appropriate for our theme, working toward our goals. The examples could continue, but the important thing is that it sets you up with a framework to both make sense of what content you could publish, but more important WHY you're publishing it. It's also important to make this concept your own. It shouldn't be overly rigid, it’s not prescriptive, nor should it be too soft… instead it should be… well, squishy. After all, stuff is going to come up and you'll have to pivot and scramble to get some sort of content online that may not entirely jive with your theme or goals exactly. To review: Establish your company goals, whatever they may be You then develop a quarterly theme based on some targets or other happenings occurring during that time You determine your preferred level of granularity, be it monthly, weekly, or even daily You then create content that both supports your theme and goals, making sure you look at it through these important lenses Then you make sure you have a variety of content, whether small and fun or technical and epic, or something between If you're interested in introducing this for your company, and you're in charge of marketing and/or content generation, you'll need to own it and act as the product owner, really. And if you have a team from which content can be developed, their buy-in is going to be key to your success. While this approach may be rooted in generating leads and driving sales, it's also about highlighting all of the things that make your company and your team amazing. Revenue generation is a nice byproduct of that. If you utilize this method, and make it work for your organization, I'm confident that in time you'll have a healthy content ecosystem. And as an aside, if you use the inbound methodology, this is a fantastic compliment to that as well. I'll go into greater detail with a downloadable template next month on our blog, so sign up to our newsletter to be informed. In the meantime, thanks for listening, and email me at smith@palantir.net should you want to discuss content ecosystems or other concepts presented today. AM: For more great tips, follow us on Twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a great day!

At the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan, one athlete pulled a move that, so far as we know, no one else had ever done in all of human history. Surya Bonaly was not your typical figure skater.  She was black. She was athletic. And she didn’t seem to care about artistry.  Her performances – punctuated by triple-triple jumps and other power moves – thrilled audiences around the world.  Yet, commentators claimed she couldn’t skate, and judges never gave her the high marks she felt she deserved.  But Surya didn’t accept that criticism.  Unlike her competitors – ice princesses who hid behind demure smiles – Surya made her feelings known.  And, at her final Olympic performance, she attempted one jump that flew in the face of the establishment, and marked her for life as a rebel.  This week, we lace up our skates and tell a story about loving a sport that doesn’t love you back, and being judged in front of the world according to rules you don’t understand.  Produced by Matt Kielty with help from Tracie Hunte. Reported by Latif Nasser and Tracie Hunte Special thanks to the Sky Rink at Chelsea Piers, the Schwan Super Rink, Richmond Training Center, Simon Bowers of Bowers Audio Service, Vanessa Gusmeroli, Phil Hersh, Allison Manley, Randy Harvey, Rob Bailey and Lynn Plage, Michael Rosenberg, and Linda Lewis If you heard "On the Edge" and you're looking to fall in love with figure skating all over again, start here: http://www.radiolab.org/story/here-are-skating-routines-we-cant-stop-watching/ You can take the survey we mentioned at the beginning of this episode here: https://www.research.net/r/wnyclistener  Thank you!  

If you've ever worked on a web project at any scale, you may have participated or lead daily scrums. These mini meetings provide regular touch points for projects, and help keep it humming.  However, those not familiar scrums may have heard the term, but don't exactly understand what they're all about. So why do we have scrums? Are they valuable? If so, what’s the best format them? And what’s the role of a scrum master, anyway? Project Manager Chad Goodrum joins Account Manager Allison Manley and shares his knowledge on the subject. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hello and welcome to The Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is a short podcast, just a few minutes long, that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better.  I’m Allison Manley. I’m an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from Chad Goodrum, one of our Project Managers. Chad is going to talk about meetings in the  development world known as scrums. Chad Goodrum [CG]: Hi, this is Chad Goodrum with Palanatir.net.  I’m a Project Manager here at Palantir. I’d like to talk today a little bit about scrums. We use those every day in a 15-minute standup with the development team, which includes our developers, designers, Product Owners from the client side, project managers, strategists, and other stakeholders inside the Palantir team.  The format of our scrums take place on video conferences. We find that scrums are more useful when they are face to face. If they can’t be face to face, we find that at least a visual representation or through video conferences work better for us.  Why do we have scrums? We use scrums daily as a way to look back in 24-hour increments what the team has worked on, what they’re going to be working on, and any issues or blockers they may have.  What’s the format of a scrum? The format of a scrum is pretty casual. People refer to them as “standups” where people used to stand up together in a 15-minute scrum. But typically what we do is we have a short conversation, and go around the room or the video conference with each individual discussing what they have worked on. So let’s say we have a developer named Jan. Jan will say what she worked on the day before, go over tickets at a high level and discuss what she worked on; she will say what she’s working on today . . . maybe it’s a continuation of those tickets, maybe it is starting something new; and then she will mention any blockers that she may have. These could be feedback from the client, feedback internally, issues with the user story or ticket that she’s working on . . . this gives the team a perspective to take a look at that issue as a whole and give immediate feedback or schedule a later call or conversation to discuss that. It’s a high level conversation that we can have internally to make sure that we are on track every day.  Some things we use to manage scrums: we have something called a scrum log. Scrum log is a basic document with each team member’s name on there discussing what they’ve done, what they’re going to do, and any blockers they have. A requirement is that it’s filled out prior to the meeting every day. The meetings are going to be at the same time every day for consistency’s sake.  Another requirement that we have is not being shy or conservative to talk about issues you are having. Sometimes this comes up with the client product owner is on the scrum. But it’s more detrimental not to talk about an issue that you’re having then to talk about it and bring it the attention of everyone on the team. What’s the role of a “scrum master?” The scrum master is not a stakeholder in the conversation itself. The scrum master is the mediator or moderator. They are the ones who are going to facilitate the conversation. They’re not there to give opinions about the process itself. So the scrum master is going to call the meeting, make sure everyone’s on time, go through the meeting, set up further meetings if there needs to be meetings internally or externally with the client.  There’s been a lot of talk internally here at Palantir about having product owners on the scrums daily, or not having the product owners on. And there’s been a lot of pros and cons of that. The pros of having the product owner on the scrum with us: it gives them daily visibility into what we’re working on. It’s a transparency at Palantir that we really like to have. That way there are no questions or concerns maybe at the end of a sprint, in two week increments, where they are unaware of what we’ve been working on for two weeks.  One of the cons that I discussed earlier was about being shy or conservative around the product owner. If someone has an issue maybe with the architecture, or some of the strategy, or some conflicts with the overall process, many times developers (myself included) will tend to be a little shy about bringing those issues up to a product owner. So sometimes we’re not as candid as we could be without the product owner. There’s talk about where being shy or not as candid could actually lower velocity for the team.  Another concept of scrum is the idea that scrums are self-managing, that there’s not one person that is responsible for the scrum. And by self-managing that means that everyone is accountable for all things. That includes the scrum log being filled out, being on scrum on time, being on video, and being candid about your issues or concerns that you may have on a daily basis. And by self-managing that means everyone on that team has the right, as well as the duty, to speak up if something is not going accordingly . . . whether someone’s late, misses scrums, or a known issue that isn’t discussed.  Scurms in general at Palantir provide an immense amount of value to the team, to the client, and to the overall success of the project. Without doing daily scrums, it would be very difficult for everyone on the team to know what others are doing on a daily basis. Check-ins once a week are not enough for us to have a consistent, transparent view of the project as it moves forward. When we’re working on any sort of format that’s agile or agile-like, daily standups or daily scrums are imperative to the project’s success.  AM: Thanks Chad! And thank you all for joining in on this week’s Secret Sauce! For more great tips, follow us on twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a great day!

DrupalCon is just a few weeks away in New Orleans, so this time around our Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by our CEO and Founder George DeMet, Drupal veteran and PHP guru Larry "Crell" Garfield, and Senior Front-End Developer Lauren Byrwa. They share thoughts about the conference generally, what they're excited about specifically, and what they're expected from the Driesnote, among other topics. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to On the Air with Palantir, a podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s April 2016, and this is episode #4. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager at Palantir, and today we are going to give a preview of what to expect from the upcoming DrupalCon in New Orleans which is taking place May 9th through the 13th. The website is drupalcon.org if you want to see more. I’m a newbie to DrupalCon — this will be my very first one — so I gathered a bunch of my seasoned colleagues here at Palantir who have attended in the past to get their thoughts on the upcoming conference. I am here with three of my fabulous colleagues that are going to be attending DrupalCon with me. So I have Lauren Byrwa, who’s one of our senior front-end developers. Lauren Byrwa [LB]: Hi! AM: George DeMet, founder and CEO. George DeMet [GD]: Hello. AM: And Larry Garfield, Senior Architect and Community Lead. How are you? Larry Garfield [LG]: Hello, world. AM: So what we’re doing here is basically a preview of DrupalCon. DrupalCon is coming up in a couple of weeks, in New Orleans, which is very exciting. How many DrupalCons is this for each of you? LG: I think this will be #21. AM: Out of how many? How many have there been? LG: Maybe 25? I’m a staple at this point [laughs]. GD: It’s a good question. Not as many as you, Larry, but probably, if I had to guess, between 15 and 20. LB: I’m actually only at #2 for Cons. So not a whole lot compared to these guys. AM: I’m a complete newbie, so we’ll get to that later — what I can expect — but before we get to what most people or new people can expect from DrupalCon, or what DrupalCon is about — we know that Drupal was started by Dries Buytaert. Did I pronounce that right? LG: Close enough for an American [laughs].  AM: What is the correct pronunciation, please? LG: Well, I’m an American too. ‘Drees Boy-thart’ I think is closer, but don’t quote me on that. Dries, feel free to correct us. AM: I’m sure he will later [laughs]. So what is DrupalCon about? LG: DrupalCon is the summit of the community. It is the largest Drupal in-person event in the world by a very wide margin. It’s a place for the whole community of whatever stripe to gather and discuss, learn, teach, plan, work, play, drink, and several other things along the same lines. A lot of conferences are very developer-centric or very business-centric, or very whatever. DrupalCon is — these days, DrupalCon is a Web conference with a Drupal angle to it. There’s sessions for back-end developers, there’s sessions for front-end developers, there’s sessions for project managers, there’s sessions for content strategists, there’s sessions for business owners — whatever you do, if it involves Drupal or the Web in some way, there’s at least a couple of sessions that are worth going to for you. GD: I would agree, and I would say that even if you don’t do Drupal or you’re not someone who’s really immersed in the technology or the community, it’s still a conference with really great value. You can get a lot out of it, and I think particularly for folks who are new to DrupalCon, it’s a really great way to get immediately connected with the community. And it’s often a very overwhelming way. We’re a very friendly and welcoming community, sometimes overly so. LB: I would like to think of DrupalCon as our family reunion, for all Drupalers. We’re there to learn, we’re there to share, but mostly we’re there to collaborate. And that can happen in sessions, that can happen at happy hour,that can happen anywhere. But it’s a great way to get plugged into the community.  AM: So I am a newbie, as I said — this will be my first. So what should I expect from DrupalCon? Am I just going to walk in and be completely overwhelmed at first? GD: Yes. AM: [laughs]. LB: I think at my first DrupalCon — overwhelmed? Yes, definitely expect to be overwhelmed no matter what. But feel comfortable, feel welcomed. Everybody is excited for newcomers. Everyone is excited to get to know you, to hear your ideas. So stand up and talk, and listen, and ask questions. And go up to people that intimidate you, and tell them that you’re a huge fan and that you work with their tools every day and that you like what you saw in this blog post. And they’ll be flattered and want to know what you think and why or why not you agree or disagree. But talk to everybody. Talk to them on Twitter, talk to them in person, talk to them at bars — everything you can do to soak up as much information as possible. That’s always my number one.  LG: The main thing you should expect at DrupalCon is 3000 introverts playing extroverts, who really want to talk to you and teach you things because that’s what they do. And if you’re up for talking to people you’ve only heard of, or never heard of, and just learning from every person you run across, you’ll do just fine. GD: And I think — so when we’re at our booth, every year without fail I’ll be standing there and someone will just kind of come up to me, and they’ll have The Look in their eyes. It’s very clear that this is their first time, they’re feeling very overwhelmed. And it’s really funny, this happens every time, they’ll make eye contact, come over to the booth, pull out their program guide, and be like, where do I go? And there’s so many different things you can do and places you can go and sessions you can experience, and it really is about — I think for folks who are going, it’s really taking a look at the sessions, figuring out ‘what do I want to get out of this event’, and focusing on that. And if you are getting overwhelmed, just find a friendly face, and they’ll more than likely be able to help you out and point you in the right direction – ‘oh yeah, I know the person doing that session, they’re awesome, go to that session if you want to learn about this, so-and-so is like the world’s expert on that’. All kinds of opportunities to just soak everything in, and learn what you can. It’s a really fun, really intense time. AM: Great, I’m really looking forward to it. So every year Dries gives a keynote. And it’s fairly spectacular, I’ve seen a bunch of them on YouTube. They’re very involved. So what are you anticipating this year from the Driesnote, as he calls it? LG: I have no idea what Dries is planning. I think the best keynote he’s given in recent years was in Amsterdam, where he was talking about actual practical changes to our process. That’s where he introduced the plan for putting credits on the site, which got implemented later. And I think that’s been a great thing to encourage contributions from companies and clients and commercial organizations, which we absolutely need.  I’d like to see something inward-looking. By that point Drupal 8.1 will have just come out, and that’ll be the first time we’ve done that type of release in, I think, ever in Drupal. So I suspect he’ll be talking about that and the implications of being able to evolve the system more smoothly than in the past. That’s my prediction, such as it is. [this was cut from the original recording due to audio issues, but is left intact for the transcript] GD: I’m hoping that Dries will take this opportunity to talk a little bit more about what the vision and future direction of Drupal is going to be, not just from a technical standpoint but really from an — answering the question, why does Drupal exist? What we’ve seen over the last few years, particularly as we’ve been through the Drupal 8 cycle, is that Drupal has changed and evolved tremendously. And at the same time the kinds of people that use Drupal, and the ways that they are using it, have changed tremendously. And I think that a lot of folks in the community have moved along with those shifts, but others might be feeling a little left behind, like they’re not really sure. Maybe if you’re somebody that’s joined Drupal at a point in the past, and you’ve had a particular motivation for doing so, the project and the community may be very different now. I think as we go through that change and that evolution, having a shared understanding and grounding in what our shared values are as a Drupal community and a project would be really cool to hear from Dries. LB: I would say we’re actually at a place right now where we don’t entirely know what’s next for Drupal. We’re not waiting on D8 any more — there’s a whole slew of things out there. And so I agree that the future of Drupal is going to be a big topic. I think in addition to that, this is our good chance and this is Dries’ good chance to really press on contribution, and to recruit people.  A lot of our hardcore developers that helped build D8 are feeling a little burnt out. They too are celebrating the release, but in addition to that, they’re feeling a little burnt out after years and years of press to get it there. So I think contribution is going to be a really big topic this year — trying to figure out how to get people involved and how to get new blood in the system and new  ideas. To really push us towards that future, that’s going to be important. AM: That’s a lot to cover in one keynote [laughs].  GD: The expectations are always incredibly high for these things. And it’s really often almost too much to ask, that one person will be able to cover this much in an hour or an hour and 15 minutes. One thing I’ve seen is that sometimes, when Dries delivers, he really delivers in a really great way. But I also know that it’s really hard to do that. So hopefully everything will click in place. I’m looking forward to it. AM: Me too. So what are the big talking points in Drupal right now? Obviously I can assume Drupal 8. What else do you think will be the big things? LB: A big focus of this year’s DrupalCon is actually a lot of the front-end frameworks and performance. Like we said earlier, it’s really kind of a dev conference with Drupal in the background. So we’re really trying to branch out as a community and accept some of the other new things going on in tech right now, and I know that’s going to be a big press this year. LG: There’s a whole lot of sessions on the front-end frameworks, like Lauren was saying, and around the discussions around, should Drupal have a front-end framework baked into it, like Angular or Ember? Or should we do something along those lines with our own components? Or should we ignore all of that? Or should we, whatever? So there’s actually a new track for this con called Horizons that has — pie-in-the-sky ideas. That’s kind of the point of that track. So we actually have the project lead of Angular talking. We have the project lead of Ember talking.  And there’s a number of other sessions along similar lines. We’ve got a core conversation that was originally supposed to be a moderated fight between people who wanted a front-end framework and people who didn’t. I think it’s turned into — those people have already fought and have a plan now, and what’s that plan, but we’ll see. Definitely, the front end and JavaScript are big talking points.  Another core conversation, as Lauren was talking about, is burnout. We have two, maybe three, sessions on time management and burning yourself out and managing volunteers, and what happens when people leave Drupal and how can we learn from the people who have. People will always come and go from any project, but how do we do that in the most graceful fashion, so that it’s good for those people and good for the project. That’s another talk we have there. And then of course, continuing the ‘get off the island’ angle, we have a Symfony track, as we’ve had the last couple of years. We have a dedicated PHP track — that’s non-Drupal-specific PHP that we actually collaborated with Php[architect] on. I was one of the track chairs for that. It’s the first time we’ve had it in North America — we’ve had it in Europe. And then the Horizons track includes a lot of big ideas outside of Drupal, so there’s a lot of, what new stuff outside of the Drupal experience should we be looking at and taking stuff from. LB: In addition to what Larry was saying, there’s a new spotlight on mental health in the tech industry, and this is going to be a big issue. You’re starting to see real sessions on mental health and taking care of yourself as a developer. But I also think it’s going to be a hot-button issue for BOFs, and you’re going to see a lot of talking about it outside of sessions as well, and how to cope with this environment. AM: OK, wait a minute. Can we define “BOF”? LB: My apologies, it’s an acronym for “birds of a feather”. It’s a group talk where people of like-minded ideas or having the same interests get together and have a conversation about it, as opposed to somebody getting up and presenting about a topic. It’s a more casual and close way to discuss some of the issues that are popular. GD: And so one of the other hats I wear in the Drupal community is serving on the Community Working Group. And I know that we’ve been talking internally about a lot of the challenges we’ve seen, experiencing burnout, and trying to improve — trying to provide more communication tools and resources, particularly for folks in the core development community. So I’m really happy to see an increased focus on that, not just at this DrupalCon but at the last couple of DrupalCons. I think we’re going to have more and more, hopefully more structured, programs and resources, so that people can contribute in a way that is sustainable in the long run. The other kind of big topic or trend that I’m seeing is — I think there’s a little bit of a question or tension, that ties into a lot of the technical questions, about the extent to which Drupal is a product and Drupal is a software platform. If you think about it in terms of Legos, is it a big box of a whole bunch of Legos that you can put together in any kind of different shape or form to create whatever you want, or is it more kind of a Lego construction kit that’s got all the tools you need to build a truck or a boat or whatever. And the extent to which we move in one direction and make Drupal more of a polished product — does that undermine our ability to be incredibly flexible? And so there’s questions like, do we have a decoupled front end? How do we approach questions like content workflow and management and all that stuff, and how much is that prescribed by the system? These are all really important questions that we’re going to have to, as a community, come to some sort of agreement or consensus on as we move forward. LG: As a side note, on the mental health front, our third keynote for Thursday is from Michael Schmid, a long-time Drupaler. He’s talking on brain health and mental health and so forth. It’s definitely an area worth the time it’s being given, which is considerable and as it should be.  AM: Great — I definitely want to get to some of the sessions that you’re excited about. So there are 13 tracks total in DrupalCon this year. Some of them are new, as you mentioned earlier, and they cover quite a range of topics. So there is something for everybody. I am not an engineer myself, but there is plenty for me to absorb at this conference [laughs], because the tracks are so varied. And I haven’t counted how many sessions there are in total, spread across those 13 tracks. LG: I think it’s 131 or something like that. AM: Wow. So there’s a lot of information being shared. So outside of the Palantir-led sessions, because we are leading three — which we’ll cover in a bit — which sessions are you most excited about, aside from the ones you’ve already mentioned? LG: I’d say I’m most looking forward to the core conversations on burnout and on community management, and on how do we keep this process sustainable? Because the way we went about Drupal 8 is not sustainable. That level of work was necessary for the project, but that kind of surge mentality of, throw warm bodies at it and work extra hard to make sure it gets done, is not a good way of developing software, open source or not. I’m looking forward to the discussions that are already slated around, how do we not do that? How do we make Drupal successful, or more successful, and how do we make our people more successful while respecting the fact that people still have lives and limits, and people have families? We don’t want to inadvertently pressure people to sacrifice those. No one consciously likes to do that, but there’s unconscious pressure at a lot of times. So how do we counteract that in a healthy fashion? Topic-wise, that’s probably what I’m most looking forward to, probably followed by some of the front-end framework discussions. LB: As a front-end developer, I’m interested in some of the config management in D8, some of the front-end frameworks, I’ll definitely be at those. But outside of that I’m also really looking  forward to the content strategy and UX things — D8 accessibility, content strategy and popular culture, some of these look really interesting. I know there’s also one on lessons from WordPress that I think is going to be really great as well. I think there’s a lot of great sessions regardless of what you’re specifically interested in.  GD: Unfortunately, one of the things about being someone in my position is that I don’t really get to go to sessions very much [laughs]. I actually have not looked too much at the program schedule yet. AM: But you will, of course [laughs]. GD: I will, certainly. And I will pick out a few sessions and put them on my calendar and will intend to go to them, and then inevitably something else will pull me away and I’ll end up watching the recording after the fact. AM: But luckily they are all recorded. GD: They are all recorded. And they’ve gotten really good at making sure that the session recordings are up usually within a day or two of when they’re recorded, which is a very impressive logistical feat. So I’m really happy with that. And in addition to Michael Schmid, or Schnitzels — that’s his nickname — and his keynote, I’m very much looking forward to, and I hope I don’t destroy her name here or we can correct it in post-production, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, who’s doing a keynote on content and design. I’ve read a lot of her stuff and I’m really excited to hear what she’s going to have to say for the Drupal community. One of the great things over the past few years is that we’ve really started thinking more about design as a project, which is really important and really challenging for an open source project – to really come together and prioritize not just what the software does but how people interact with it. LG: That’s something that we’ve been seeing not just in the visual design aspect. We have a session in the PHP track that I’m really looking forward to, called “Your API is a UI”. The idea is that code should be designed with the same kind of thought you put into user experience for someone pushing buttons — it also needs to go into how someone is writing code. And that’s something that the community is starting to get their head around in the last couple of years. So I’m really excited for that session and others like it, that push that concept. AM: Well, let’s talk about the ones that Palantir is leading. We have three. One is “PHP 7: The New New PHP”. LG: I talk about new stuff [laughs]. This is a talk that I’ve given at a few PHP conferences – it’s not Drupal-specific at all, it’s in the PHP track. PHP 7 was released last fall, right after Drupal 8 was – its release date was actually pushed back because of Drupal, we kept finding bugs. But for the developers and sysadmins in the room, if you have not tried out PHP 7, you really need to. It’s got a ton of really nice new features which I talk about in the session, and it’s twice as fast. And I’m not just showing marketing numbers – there are companies that have said they’ve shut down half their servers by switching to PHP 7. It is dramatically faster. Drupal 8 requires PHP 5 or later, and I would say, within six months if you’re not running Drupal 8 on PHP 7 – you’re doing it wrong. You’re leaving money on the table, you’re hindering your own developers. So come to the session. I’ll tell you all the reasons why as a developer you really, really want to be using PHP 7 right now. AM: Really, really! LG: Really, really, really [laughs]! AM: So your second session is “D8 Module Acceleration Program”.  LG: And this isn’t a normal track session, this is actually in the Business Showcase. It’s a panel that Acquia is putting together. Acquia, as some of our listeners know, has been funding a program called MAP — Module Acceleration Program — which is basically, hey, Drupal 8 is out, what about contrib, let’s put some actual money behind getting the major contrib modules up and running on Drupal 8. And Palantir has been partnered with them, as have a number of other companies. Acquia has provided some funding, and Palantir is working at a reduced rate because we’re doing community work, essentially. My main work for the last few months has been the Workbench moderation module for Drupal 8, as well as the multi-version Workspace deploy suite which I’m collaborating on with some other developers at Pfizer. So the idea is there’s a panel of people who have been working as part of this program, saying, okay, what is it, why is it, what are the benefits of it, what does it mean for contributing to open source. Teaser: contributing to open source is a viable and important part of any business that’s using it, and it is a worthwhile investment. Now you can come to the session to hear the details of that. AM: Cool. So the last session is George’s session, “Finding Your Purpose as a Drupal Agency”. GD: Yes, so I’m going to be doing a session in the Business track. It’s a little bit, for those who might have seen the session I did for DrupalCon Barcelona last fall, it’s a little bit of a sequel to that session. Essentially what I’m going to be talking about are some of the challenges. Last year was a fairly challenging time for a lot of companies in the Drupal ecosystem. Everyone was kind of waiting for Drupal 8 to come out — a lot of folks were holding off on starting new projects because of that, and so I’m going to talk a little about that. I’m reaching out to some other folks, some other companies in the Drupal ecosystem, hoping to get them to share some of their perspectives as well.  But then I’ll be talking about how, particularly during challenging times but during any time in general, the value of defining your purpose as an agency — your vision, your values, and how those things really come together and enable you to really have kind of a focus for where you’re taking your company. And not just how you run your agency, but also why — which I think is a question that doesn’t get asked often enough. So I’m really looking forward to that. For people that might be interested, it’s not just for folks that run Drupal companies. If you are involved in or interested in any way about how companies are run, and even — I’m not going to be talking that much about Drupal in particular, so I think it will be really valuable for folks, obviously even non-technical. And one of the things I do with my talks is a lot of analogies, so I’ll probably have some pretty entertaining analogies for folks. AM: Great. Well, as Lauren touched on, beyond the sessions DrupalCon is also about the social life, and the socializing, and the community around it. So what am I to expect as a newbie, going to my very first one, after the daily sessions are over? LB: Expect to be overwhelmed. Expect to be bombarded. And expect a little debauchery. I think you’ll be entertained, to say the least, but everybody is very friendly, everybody wants to buy you a drink and hear your thoughts. And everybody wants to argue. So be willing to defend your ideas, because it will come. And you might change your mind and you might change somebody else’s, but that’s the glory in all of it. And I’ve found a lot more meaning comes from the conversations outside of the sessions than sometimes during them. So I always encourage especially first-time Drupalers or first-time Con-goers, don’t stop after the sessions. Go to the after-stuff, even if you don’t drink, even if you just want to sit there and have water and talk to people, or have a Coke. It doesn’t have to be about the drinking, and it’s a really great place to socialize and share ideas. AM: I understand that in the past there’s been things like trivia night, or karaoke, or just meeting at ping-pong [laughs]. GD: Well, in fact there is a trivia night on Thursday, and we are sponsoring it, as we have for the last couple of DrupalCons. And for me at least, it’s one of the highlights of the whole event. The key is, try to find a table with people who have been around the community a little while. But the questions can be all over the place, and sometimes they even give credit for having someone who’s at their first DrupalCon at your table. AM: So what, you get something like frequent flier miles for your very first one? [laughs].  LG: It varies by year, but I think your team gets a bonus point for every person at your table who’s at their first DrupalCon. If it’s your first time at a DrupalCon, that makes you a valuable commodity, so show up anyway [laughs]. AM: I should wear a sign. LG: And I think there’s actually a penalty if someone on your team is a core committer. So don’t always go for the table with all of the lead developers because you get a penalty for having them on your team. I’m not a core committer so I have no penalty one way or another. GD: The trivia night is on Thursday night, and I think a lot of folks may be tempted to leave early because Thursday is the last day of sessions, but definitely stick around for trivia night on Thursday. And stick around for the sprints on Friday as well. Folks are generally fairly tired by that point, but sometimes being tired at that place really lets you focus [laughs] on getting cool stuff done. And it’s not just code, it’s all sorts of things. There’s documentation sprints, we’ll often do some community work as well — all sorts of things going on even after the sessions are over. LB: Definitely, it’s an exhausting week and it’s a long one. But those sprints at the end, those make the difference, and that’s how you really get involved and how you really learn stuff. So don’t ever think that, oh, I’m not an engineer, or, I don’t know how to do this. Because if you show up, we will find a job for you. LG: There’s a number of people at sprints every year whose job is, it’s just part of sprints, to mentor people in getting started. Get your dev environment set up, figure out where to find issues to work on, figure out if you want to do code or documentation or usability testing or whatever else you’re going to do — whatever you’re interested in doing, there’s a use for it, and someone who can hold your hand along the way to get involved in it. So, yeah DrupalCon doesn’t end on Thursday, DrupalCon ends on Saturday. AM: That’s a long conference. It is. Sunday to Saturday, pretty much. LG: It is, but for all of that, it’s one of the cheapest conferences around for that length of time. It’s definitely worth the value of going. AM: So then let’s delve into the exhibition space and the vendor space. What can attendees expect from going into the vendor room, besides being thrown a whole lot of swag? Pencils, buttons, tattoos, all sorts of things [laughs]. LB: So there’s the swag, which is always wonderful. And you will find some very cool and unique swag, depending on what booths you’re at. But what I think is funny, having worked a booth before, is you’ll see vendors kind of use it as bait. They’ll watch you walk by and they’ll watch you want it but not want to talk to people, because, like Larry said earlier, we’re all introverts. We’re just pretending for the week. And so they’ll kind of bait you with it, and they’ll get you to talk. And they’ll start with something small and introductory, and you might find yourself connecting with people you didn’t expect. LG: People are generally not too pushy about it, most of the time. But yeah, tech conferences are where introverts go to cosplay extroverts. GD: So as somebody who’s been to a lot of different conferences, and seen a lot of different exhibition spaces and exhibit halls and vendor booths and all that stuff — I really love the DrupalCon exhibit hall because it’s a lot more down-to-earth. It’s a lot less sales-y than most other conferences out there. You definitely have folks who will put a little flair on their booth or have some wacky promotion or something like that, but it doesn’t feel forced as it does at many other kinds of conferences. You really can, as Lauren said, just go up to people and have a conversation. And most of the time they’ll be happy to talk to you and not just to convert the sale. AM: So of course I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that we’re going to have a booth and we’re going to be luring people in with our swag as well [laughs]. LG: Come to our booth! Say hi! We’ve got swag! AM: That’s right [laughs]. Come to our booth, there’s going to be about seven or eight of us this year, and we’re going to be booth number 222. Come visit! And the website for DrupalCon is… LG: http://www.drupalcon.org . That will redirect you to what the actual URL is.  AM: Perfect. LG: One final note. On Tuesday, you go to the pre-note. That’s not even a question. You go to the pre-note. Everyone goes to the pre-note. GD: The pre-note is kind of a tradition that’s sprung up over the last five or six years or so. It’s the presentation that occurs before the keynote on Tuesday. And it’s generally put together by the same group of people. It’s intended for people who have never been to DrupalCon before, but it’s enjoyable by everyone, and they go to great lengths to make it incredibly enjoyable. So in the past, there was one that was all themed around Disney musicals — they’re very often tied into the culture of the location where DrupalCon is being held. Occasionally in the past we have even seen Larry up on stage [laughs] singing and dancing… AM: And wearing inappropriate things [laughs]. LG: Those things were very appropriate given the character I was playing. AM: Fair enough, fair enough [laughs]. LG: Without giving too much away — this year is more musical numbers, and I’m sure there will be shenanigans [laughs]. We’re still working on it as we speak, but expect shenanigans. You want to be at the pre-note. It’s worth waking up early for. AM: Early? How early is it? LG: It’s before the keynote on Tuesday, so it’s at 8 am. And it’s worth being up and at the conference center for. AM: Good, I look forward to it. Thank you all for joining me. I’m looking forward to my first DrupalCon, thanks so much. LB: Thanks for joining us, and you can find us at DrupalCon. GD: Thank you. See you in New Orleans. LG: See you in New Orleans. Let’s have some fun! And learn stuff [laughs]. AM: Thank you so much for listening. If you want to hear more episodes of On the Air with Palantir, make sure to subscribe on our website at palantir.net. There you can also read our blog and see our work! Each of these episodes is also available on iTunes. And of course you can also follow us on Twitter at @palantir. See you at DrupalCon New Orleans!

Account Manager Allison Manley is joined today by... well, herself! She shares valuable insights on building effective Strategy Reports –  the document we generate at the end of the discovery and strategy phase of any project that includes the summary of our work, methodology, KPIs, competitive analysis, personas, usability test results, and much more – for your project. In short, they're very important. Related: How to Build a Strong Project Foundation with Practical Personas by Carl Martens TRANSCRIPT AM: Hello and welcome to The Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. As always, this is a quick podcast, just a few minutes long, that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better.  I’m Allison Manley. I’m an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from . . . . me! Haha! Today I’m going to talk about Strategy Reports, which is a report that we at Palantir generate at the end of the discovery and strategy phase of any project. Some agencies refer to these as Creative Briefs, particularly if you’re in design or advertising. And they are essentially the same thing: it’s a report that summarizes all the research and findings uncovered from the discovery and strategy work done at the beginning of a project. It outlines the goals of the project, and then gives recommendations moving forward for the remainder of the project. They can be just a few pages long, or even 100 pages long depending on the depth and detail of the research.  Some items that could be included in a Strategy Report are the following:  A summary of the work, and the methodology used;A definition of strategic goals and recommended paths forward, with supporting metrics and data to help drive internal change management; Any Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for measuring project success;Competitive analysis;Documentation of content management needs, governance and workflows;A review of any existing content strategies to recommend how to best manage content moving forward;Assuming of course you’re doing a website, ideas in which the content can be marketed and expanded beyond the web site into additional campaigns;A content migration strategy outlining how content will be moved that will include initial recommendations on time and resources required, and how to minimize the SEO impact;Any results from usability tests or surveys created during the initial phases;Any persona development created from the uncovered research;And it could even include a project schedule with milestones for strategic objectives or completion of work throughout the remainder of the process. So as you can see, they can include a lot of really valuable information, or as little as you need depending on your project.  Strategic Reports are terrific for a number of reasons. First, they lay the groundwork for the entire team. That could include marketing and communications folks, designers, stakeholders, developers, etc. The report makes sure the entire team knows exactly what the roadmap is for the project going forward, and lays a strong foundation as to how that roadmap was developed. It informs the next phases of wireframing, developing the information architecture, creating designs, and through development as all those people on the team know exactly why they are making each decision along the way when they are creating the final product.  Second, it’s a fantastic reference in case you get lost during the process. It’s really easy on long projects in particular as scope expands, or changes, or new team members come on or off a project, to lose focus on what you’re building in the first place. So when the team starts to feel like it’s straying off the path in any way, go back to that Strategy Report and review the overall goals and why you got there to help you focus back on what’s necessary to complete the project. I wrote a blog post recently called You Don’t Want Fries With That that talks about this particular reason why upfront strategy is so critical to any project.  Lastly, and this reason is more pragmatic, a summary report simply justifies a lot of the upfront research and offers peace of mind! Building discovery time into a project is critical to completing any job thoughtfully. But a stakeholder on the client end may wonder what they’re getting for their money, and they’ll want to see something tangible to justify that expense. A website is an expensive proposition, no doubt, and usually the most critical and visible marketing piece an organization produces. So of course a stakeholder might get concerned if several weeks of research and testing are happening, but they don’t see anything tangible until they see designs or wireframes much later. So summarizing all the initial work into a Strategy Report gives them peace of mind that progress is being made, as well as setting up the rest of the project beautifully for success.  That’s why I love Strategy Reports so much for every project. Thank you all for listening to this week’s Secret Sauce! For more great tips, follow us on twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a great day!

Today Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by Alex Brandt our Sales and Operations Coordinator who walks you through the top four most important things you should consider before starting up a conversation with your next strategic vendor partner. Considering these things first will set you up for a higher rate of success in finding the best vendor fit for your project.Transcript AM: Hello and welcome to The Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is a quick podcast, just a few minutes long, that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better.  I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from Alex Brandt. Alex works on our Sales team and fields a lot of our new business inquiries, so she has some thoughts on how to best prepare yourself for your next web project.  AB: Hi, I’m Alex Brandt and I’m Palantir’s Sales and Operations Coordinator. Are you in the planning stages of a new web project? Today I’m going to walk you through the four important things you need to consider before you’re ready to start up a conversation with your next strategic partner. First, what kind of internal resources do you have? Are you a web team of one, or do you have a few developers who are just looking for some guidance? Maybe your design team is looking for a development partner who can implement their designs. Whatever the case may be, knowing what kind of internal resources are available can help your strategic partner frame the scope of your project to be most successful, while staying within the constraints of your timeline and budget.  Second, who else will be involved in the decision making process? Do you need to get anyone else on board with the project before you can get started? Do you need to get board approval or stakeholder buy-in? This is important to know, because there’s nothing more frustrating than being really excited and ready to start a project, and then realizing there is a long formal process you need to follow for selecting a partner agency. Also, the agency you’re hoping to work with might be able to provide you with some tools that can help you frame your argument for why the project is important. Third, what deadlines are driving the project? If your website is your prime lead capturing tool and you have a major conference you are sponsoring at the end of the year, you’re going to want to make sure your new website has launched by then so you can hit your marketing goals. Alternatively, if you are a large university, you want to make sure your website is functioning properly by the time prospective students are clicking through your course catalogue. Another thing you might need to consider in regard to timeline is that you may need to split your project into different chunks of time to span multiple fiscal years. This brings us to the final question you should be able to answer: what kind of budget are you working with? I know, your first inclination is to say “we have no idea, we’re asking around to figure this out,” but, if I were to throw out a budget in the range of $1 million, you might think that is way more than you were thinking and if I were to throw out a budget of $1,000 that might be way less than you were thinking.  So what’s the rough number you have in your head? Maybe this project is the largest rebranding effort for your institution in the last ten years, and you have a budget of $500k set aside for its undertaking. Perhaps you are just looking to fix some things that are broken or make your website responsive, and you have a budget closer to a high five-figure range. Whether your budget is expansive or modest, having a rough idea of this number will help your strategic partner scope out a project that will be successful and hit your goals. To sum things up, here’s a quick checklist of questions you should ask yourself when planning a new project: What kind of internal resources do you have?Who else will need to be involved in the decision making process?What’s driving your deadline for launch?What is your budget? So, do you think you’re ready to start a project? Let’s talk! AM: Thank you Alex, and thank you all for listening to this week’s Secret Sauce! For more great tips, follow us on twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a great day!

AM: Hello and welcome to The Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is a super short podcast, just a few minutes every week, that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better.  I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from one of our Web Strategists Joe Allen Black, who has some ideas on how to measure Key Performance Indicators, also known as KPIs.  JAB: I wake up every day and put a little black tracker called a FitBit on my belt. It’s quite tiny, with a little screen and white numbers on it that syncs up to an app on my phone. As I take steps each day, the little tracker keeps count of how far I’ve gone and compares my numbers to the number of steps my friends have taken as well. My goal each day is 10,000 steps — which is easy on the day I run a big race, but it can be seemingly impossible during a day when I’m crunching numbers in a spreadsheet on the couch. For me, the 10,000 steps is a daily KPI, or Key Performance Indicator. It’s a guidepost for me to achieving my daily fitness goals. So, what’s the whole point of this story? It’s really to get you thinking about tracking and setting up benchmarks on your websites. You can do this in your real life — thinking about the number of steps you take like I do, or hours of sleep you get each night — or on your site when you’re thinking about why you have your site and the types of things that are really bringing in your revenue. If you’re a new site, you should make sure you’re adding a tracking system to your site. For free you can use Google Analytics, which many of our clients use. At first, it’s a little daunting when you open it up, but don’t worry after popping in a few times, it definitely becomes a little friendlier. Of the dozens of types of numbers your tracking system is capturing, you’re going to want to just to key in on just a few for overall health of your site. We’re going to call these your Key Performance Indicators. What your KPIs are will differ depending on your industry. The numbers will generally fall into just a few categories: The first one’s conversions: Conversions are the actions you want your visitors to take when they use your site. In some ways you can think of this as what will make money for your site, or what will keep you going. A couple examples of these can include: On an education website, this can be the number of people who register for a course. The payment they make ultimately is a top way the education site is making its revenue. On a site like Palantir’s, we’re all about finding new customers and connecting with people who are looking for our services. A main conversion on our site is people filling out a contact form so our sales team can start working with them on a deal. A news site might be focusing on increasing the number of pageviews, since the ads on those pages are what makes the money. We then start looking at a bucket that I like to call micro-conversions, which is a fancy way of tracking the things that lead to people taking conversions, but they’re not really quite there yet. The other day I added some items to my Amazon Wishlist, I didn’t really buy anything, I didn’t spend any money, but I’m really getting close to making that conversion. I’m definitely leading toward doing that soon, so I’m making a micro-conversion at that point. Other industries may see this as users taking part in live chats, or filling out a form get an ebook or something of that nature. Last, but certainly not least, I recommend some overall site health tracking metrics. For commerce sites or sales sites, these numbers don’t necessarily lead to an immediate sale. However, these health numbers lead to knowing if there are problems or opportunities. Tracking page views per session across devices and browsers is the number one I like to look at. If I am regularly tracking how how people use my site on mobile versus desktop, I can quickly see if there’s any problems for mobile users if I change something on my site . . . if I see those mobile numbers go really down, for example. Bounce rate is another one we look at: Bounces are the number of times people go to a page and then leave without taking another measurable action. If I see a giant fluctuation in that, it could mean I need to reassess some recent choices, or examine why some people to see why users aren’t sticking around on my pages. I also like to recommend looking at the types of content people are leaving the site from. If see my exit rate on my blogs for instance going really high, I might have a problem I should address over there. If it’s really low on my sales page, I might have an even bigger problem. As you begin a redesign, it’s important to really think about what those KPIs are from the start. Before a design or development process really begins in earnest, it’s important to explicitly state what those KPIs are and then optimize your site for them. For example, if you’re a hospital, maybe one of your KPIs could be growing the number of people who make an appointment. In that case, as you design your homepage, or your content, or anything else, it’s important to think about how you can give clear paths to making an appointment on each of those experiences. Most sites we work with will have 1 to 3 main actions or conversions they want users to take. The sites may have 5-to-10 other actions that they are curious about but those are those micro-conversions, or things that are less important to the overall bottom line. If you’re someone using Google Analytics, which many of our clients do, you want to set Google Analytics to track those conversions so you know how many visitors are doing what you hoped they would. It’s a good idea to keep a regular scoreboard of these KPIs so you can constantly look back to see if you’re growing at the rate that you want to, and you can correct if you aren’t.  You can also include the site health metrics, too, so you can find out where you are having those problems, or where you have reasons to celebrate across the board. Here at Palantir, we like to document and discuss these goals right off the bat with our clients, so we can make sure we are hitting the right points early and throughout the project. We bring this discussion into each subsequent decision about the website from what features should be included, or not included, and even to what type of navigation we’re going to include. After a site launches, we want to make sure our customers have that same experience I talked about earlier with my FitBit — they have a simple benchmark that lets them know if they’re hitting their goal. Thank you. AM: Thank you Joe, and that’s it for today’s Secret Sauce. For more information on how to measure analytics for your site, check out Joe’s blog post from last year all about what metrics to check before a redesign. And the address for our site is Palantir.net. You can also follow us on twitter @palantir to always see what we’re up to. Have a great day!

AM: Hi again everyone, and welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a quick piece of advice to help your business run smoother.  I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from one of the Founders of Palantir, George DeMet, who is going to address the need for having a code of conduct at your organization or event. GD: Hi, my name is George DeMet, and I’m the founder and CEO of Palantir.net. Today, I’m going to be talking about codes of conduct and how they can help make communities, organizations, and events more inclusive. First, a little bit of background. I’m currently the acting chair of the Drupal Community Working Group, whose mission is to uphold the Drupal Code of Conduct in order to maintain a friendly and welcoming community for the Drupal project. In the past, I have also helped write codes of conduct for open source community events, including DrupalCon, and have provided consultation and guidance to organizations and groups who are looking to adopt codes of conduct for themselves. In its simplest form, a code of conduct is a policy used by an organization to establish the standards for behavior and appropriate conduct when interacting with others in a defined space like a conference, workplace, project, or event venue. Almost any venue that serves the public, such a theater, museum, sports arena, or ice skating rink, has a code of conduct posted that sets expectations for people so that they don’t engage in unsafe behavior that interferes with the ability of others to enjoy that space. In the context of technology communities, codes of conduct fill a similar function, helping to create inclusive spaces where people can feel safe and welcome to contribute. Unfortunately, what we’ve seen all too frequently is that even as more and more people are participating in open source and other technology communities, the number of incidents of harassment has also increased. Technology communities in general, and open source projects in particular, frequently suffer from a lack of diversity, with low participation rates by women, people of color, and other marginalized populations who are frequently the targets of harassing behavior. A well-written and implemented code of conduct can help address those issues by making it clear that communities value openness and diversity, and are committed to providing an inclusive space that is free from harassment and where all kinds of people can contribute in a professional manner.  Just having a code of conduct won’t get rid of every issue, but making sure that everyone underst ands the values of your community and the ground rules for interacting with others makes a huge difference. A good code of conduct will have the impact of making it easier for everyone to participate in your community. So, how do you go about drafting a code of conduct? Fortunately, there’s a ton of great resources out there that provide a great foundation that you can build upon to meet the needs of your organization or community. Don’t worry, we’ll provide links to all of these in the description of this episode, as well as on our website at palantir.net. For conferences and other events looking for a good anti-harassment policy, the Ada Initiative’s Conference Code of Conduct is a great example for others to use. What it does well is make it clear that harassment will not be tolerated at the event, provides examples of what kinds of behaviors constitute harassment and tells folks how they can let event staff or organizers know if they feel they’ve been subjected to harassing behavior.  The code of conduct that we use at Palantir for meetups and other events that we host is based heavily on the Ada Initiative code, with some additional language borrowed from the code of conduct used by the Drupal Association for DrupalCons and other events.  It’s very important that everyone who attends your event be aware that you have a code of conduct and be able to easily access it. That means that in addition to having it posted on your event website, you should also have a printed copy on display at the event itself, usually near the entrance or event registration desk, and if you have a printed program guide, it should be included in there as well. It’s also a really good idea to mention the code of conduct at the beginning of your event or during an opening plenary session and point out who to talk to if someone has something to report. Which brings us to the question of enforcement. One mistake a lot of events make is adopting a code of conduct, but not creating sufficient mechanisms to enforce it. In some cases, where the behavior in question is endangering the physical safety of another attendee or breaking the law, the answer is obvious: event staff needs to immediately remove the perpetrator from the premises and call the cops if necessary. Often though, the answers aren’t always that clear-cut, and it’s important that your event staff or the person in charge of enforcing the code of conduct knows how to handle the situation. Ideally, you want to have multiple people who are empowered to handle code of conduct reports, and you need to have those people fully understand and appreciate the responsibility they have, as well as be folks who attendees can feel safe talking to and can trust to handle their reports with discretion.  Now a community code of conduct operates on most of the same principles as an event code of conduct. While an event code is largely designed to govern in-person interactions at a conference, meetup, or other event, a community code of conduct helps set the standards for conduct when it comes to the way we collaborate and communicate with others.  I believe a community code of conduct should be built around and reinforce the shared values of the community in question.  In my work with the Drupal Community Working Group, a lot of the issues that we deal with are not harassment issues, but conflicts between people who are really frustrated with one thing or another and end up lashing out at each other in negative and unproductive ways. In those cases, we usually find ourselves in less of an enforcement role and more of a mediator role. One of the core tenets of our community code of conduct that is we treat each other with respect, even when when we disagree, and often just reminding people of that can be enough to alleviate the situation. Sometimes however, you do end up with a situation that requires a greater level of intervention, and that’s where it’s really important to have a good conflict resolution policy and process. In the Drupal community, we encourage people to work things out between themselves whenever possible, asking for help from others as needed. We think this approach helps give people more control over the outcome of their dispute and is more likely to lead to a lasting resolution.  If that’s not possible though, folks can escalate to the Community Working Group, and we’ll do  what we can to help resolve the situation. We are very clear, though, that under no circumstances is bullying or harassment tolerated within our community, no matter how long you’ve been in the community or how many contributions you’ve made.  In addition to the resources we provide on the Drupal Community Working Group pages, another good place to check out is the Django project code of conduct, which has also been adopted by the jQuery Foundation and others. The Contributor Covenant and the Citizen Code of Conduct are also fantastic starting points for community codes of conduct that are used by a wide variety of projects and communities. There’s been a lot of discussion and debate about codes of conduct in various open source communities lately, and there’s been a lot of misinformation floating around out there. What I can tell you based on my experience is that no matter what kind of community you’re involved with, having a well-written and enforced code of conduct helps create a more level playing field for participation and an environment that helps encourage contribution and involvement that you would not get otherwise.  Thanks! AM: That’s the end of this week’s Secret Sauce. For more great tips or links to some resources regarding a code of conduct, please check out the transcription of this podcast on our website at Palantir.net. You can also follow us on twitter at Palantir. Have a great day!Resources: Ada Initiative Conference Code of Conduct:  http://confcodeofconduct.com/ Palantir.net Code of Conduct:  https://www.palantir.net/code-of-conduct Drupal Community Working Group: https://www.drupal.org/governance/community-working-group  Django Code of Conduct: https://www.djangoproject.com/conduct/  Contributor Covenant: http://contributor-covenant.org/  Citizen Code of Conduct: http://citizencodeofconduct.org/  Codes of Conduct 101 + FAQ http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/codes-of-conduct-101-faq

Today’s Secret Sauce comes from one of our talented web designers Ashley Cyborski, who is a champion of designing in the browser. Not only is the method a major part of the design process here at Palantir.net, a deeper understanding of code and how it relates to design can allow web designers to push the limits of what their designs can – and probably should – do. We'll be back next Tuesday with another episode of the Secret Sauce and a new installment of our long-form interview podcast On the Air With Palantir next Thursday, but for now subscribe to all of our episodes over on iTunes.Transcript AM: Hi again everyone, and welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a quick tip on some very small thing you can do to help your business be much more awesome. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from one of our talented web designers Ashley Cyborski, who is going to champion the benefits of designing in the browser. AC: Hey everyone, My name is Ashley Cyborski and I’m a designer here at Palantir. A major part of our design process for projects is designing in the browser. At first, I was a bit reluctant to learn code. It sounds kind of intimidating, but doing so has made me happier with my designs and much more efficient in my work. Now, I’m a strong believer of working in the medium. As a web designer, it is important that we understand the medium and tools used to create our designs. Some people think that working in code will limit their creativity, but I’ve had the very opposite experience. Understanding the basics of CSS, HTML, and some JS [JavaScript] give me an understanding of what is possible. A deeper understanding allows me to push those limits and really flex my creativity on the web. I’ve written a post about this topic that you can find on our blog, but I want to go through a few of the reasons that I think designing in code is something that every web designer should at a minimum dabble in.  First, your designs will be more accurate, and more realistic. Have you ever comped up a design in Photoshop, only to have your developer push back and say “this is too hard to do” or “it’s impossible” or that you need to modify various pieces so that the designs will work? If you are the one writing the HTML and CSS, you will be able to implement these harder bits. Creative thinking, which we all practice, extends to code. I’ve found that I’m able to code out some interesting bits that have stumped my development team. When you are invested in the designs, you are invested in getting the details right. You don’t have to worry about passing it off to someone else who maybe has different priorities. Additionally, you can design with real content. Not that you can’t do that in Photoshop, but you don’t have to adjust the whole page when you change one little thing. There’s no need for random little boxes to measure the distance between list items or titles. Just type the value once and it remains consistent throughout your design. You can easily explore how various title lengths work, or how a news item looks with or without an image. And you don’t have to shift other things around on the page. They just shift on their own. You are able to realistically see how things adjust responsively. There is no need to create two or even three comps to show a tablet view or a mobile view. You can show it more realistically in the browser, how it shifts within a single comp.  The real highlight though is when a client comes back with feedback. You only have to make that change in one spot, rather than in two or three static comps. Secondly, all these little pieces give your clients a better understanding of the final design as well. Before, I often found that clients struggled to understand how a site might change as it adjusts to different viewports. But if you use code, they are seeing it as it actually is. The colors are rendering properly, as are the fonts. They can see how hover states work, and you can implement simple animations to show them things without having to provide a vague explanation that can be hard to understand.  Third, you will be more efficient once you master the code. Initially, it may slow you down a bit because you are learning, but once you get a basic understanding, you can create one comp that communicates responsive design, you can implement changes without having the page break apart. and you can set up basic styles that you can reuse consistently, and adjust in one spot.  These are all things with basic HTML and CSS that will increase your efficiency. But once you have mastered those, you can begin to add more tools such as a templating systems or things like sass, compass, postcss, or gulp that will increase your efficiency and improve your workflow. Designing in the browser doesn’t just increase your efficiency, but it increases your team’s efficiency as well. You are shortening and combining two steps of the process. Not only are you not creating as many static comps, but you are shortening the process of translating those comps into code. And since you are the ones implementing the design, it shortens the design QA process. This leads to the fourth benefit to designing in the browser, you can communicate better with your developer. Since you are implementing behaviors in your code, you don’t have to describe an interaction or animation, because you already made it. By writing the code, you have left little room for interpretation, so there will be less translation error between the design and development phases. You can add additional comments in your code that your developers can follow. You and your developers are now speaking the same language. There is no need for an interpreter which can ultimately lead to better cross team collaboration throughout the entirety of the project. You’ve already heard from Carl [Martens] in a previous podcast about design systems, and designing in the browser helps to maintain and truly utilize the benefits of a design system during the process. The fifth benefit is the ability to create reusable code. This code can be as small as a single class, or as large as an entire component. You can reuse existing components to craft them into additional, new components that maintain the base styles of your system. All of these benefits come together to make you more efficient, but the real benefit is to your clients. I spoke about how they are viewing their designs in code, as they will ultimately end up, giving them better understanding of the process and their final product. But your efficiency saves them time, which translates to either a smaller budget, or more features in their final site. So how does designing in the browser fit into your process? For me, I usually start with some design discovery and exploration, maybe create some wireframes, and static comps using my tool of choice. Only from there do I move into the browser. I’ve found that you need to get some initial buy-in before you get into the code. My static comps tend to be desktop comps, and when I code them, I begin to make them responsive. As a team, we have improved the process by including a living styleguide with our prototypes. We break each page out into its components and document these along with their elements. This is a tool for our clients after we hand over the site, and for our developers as they implement the site into additional templates. Learning to design in code can greatly improve your process and final product. So where should you get started? There are many resources online, from instructional posts and videos, to tutorials. I’ve found the best way to learn is to get your hands dirty. Take one of your existing designs and attempt to recreate it using HTML and CSS. All you really need to get started is some type of text editor. I use Sublime Text. Create one document for your HTML, name it index.html. Add a doctype to the top and a head tag and body tag. You can check online to find how to do that. Create another doc named styles.css. Use a link tag to connect the two together, and drag the index.html file into your browser. Within the body tag, write something simple like, “hello world.” You should see it in your browser. Within the body section, you can start to write your HTML, and on your styles.css page, you can begin to write your styles. You can style an element with a class or just style the element itself. Just get the initial coding bit out of the way first, and worry about best practices later. I can’t really describe that feeling of accomplishment when you’ve been working to code something and you finally get it to look right in the browser. It is really awesome! I really think that learning the basics of designing in code can help to improve your process and increase your efficiency. Your clients will really appreciate it as well. I hope I’ve encouraged you to give it a chance! Thanks. AM: Thank you Ashley, and thank you all for listening to this week’s Secret Sauce! For more great tips, follow us on twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a great day!

Our Director of Professional Services Ken Rickard joins the Secret Sauce podcast today to tell us a little more about our consulting services.While we take on epic, end-to-end projects often, we also find that some clients don't need the long-term services. Instead, they need strategic help with a specific challenge, or perhaps require staff augmentation – in particular with Drupal projects – for a limited time.What works and what doesn't with such engagements? We always structure consulting engagements to ensure the work we perform adds the most value to your team and organization, based on a frequency (often weekly) that ensures your goals are being met.Need a helping hand? Let's schedule a time to talk.TRANSCRIPTAM: Hi, welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from Ken Rickard, our Director of Professional Services, who is going to give a quick plug about our consulting services.KR: Hi, I’m Ken Rickard. I’m the Director of Professional Services here at Palantir. Today we’re  going to talk a little bit about our consulting services. As you may know, we’re a full-service web strategy design and development firm, but we also do smaller engagements where some of our clients need strategic consulting to supplement the staff that they already have. In particular with Drupal projects, what we find in a lot of cases is clients that have existing staff who are very talented and very skilled, but don’t have a lot of direct Drupal experience. What we can do in that case is rather than do a big bundle of upfront training, what we put together is a consulting package, where you get to work with one of our experts during the life of your entire project. And it’s a very simple arrangement in which we spend a few days getting to know each other, getting the project plan together, and in particular structuring the build of the project so that you don’t have to learn all the parts of Dupal first. So we can start with some content modeling, then you move on to building out content types. Then you start layering in Views and Panels, and all the other things that make a site functional and exciting.During this whole engagement, instead of contracting us or someone else to go out and build it, your staff is doing the work. And what we’re doing is having an expert guide you through that. So we do this with check-in meetings. We set these up as two simple meetings a week. Generally on Monday . . . first thing Monday morning we get together, we meet for about a half hour and review  what are your goals for the week: are you trying to build out Events? Are you trying to build out Single Sign On integration with an LDAP service (which is a very typical thing for our university clients)?As consultants, we walk through the problems and the challenges you’re trying to solve that week. We point out opportunities that you might have overlooked, we point out solutions that might already exist in the marketplace, and we look to the pitfalls that you might run into, such as, “if you try to do it this way you may run into this problem.” Or,  “if you use this module, it may prevent you from doing this other feature that you’d like.”That helps you plan out your week. It also lets us ask, “is there anything we need to do to supplement you this week? Do you need any additional research done? Do you need us to review any specifications?” or things like that.Then we meet later in the week, on a Thursday or a Friday for about an hour, and review the work you’ve completed. It’s peer review. It’s the chance to walk through and see, “did it function the way you expected? Did you run into any unexpected bugs? If so, how do we troubleshoot those?” Because what we find the value to this consultation is . . . I would say 90% of the time your team is going to get it right. They’re going to have the right answer. But there are two things: number one, they may not know that they have the right answer, and that’s really discouraging. It puts the project at risk and it puts the team in a very bad position because they are just uncertain. It’s very hard to move forward confidently when you are uncertain, so we can come in and help provide that level of certainty. The second piece is in the 10% of cases where they don’t get it right the first time, it’s generally because they’ve either misunderstood a fundamental concept that’s not well-documented or is peculiar to Drupal, or because they’ve run into a very deep structural bug that needs expert analysis. So we’ve done several of these engagements with small clients and with large clients, and they are very very effective capacity builders. The other thing that they give you is a safety net, because if it does turn out that the project is bigger than your team can handle, we have someone positioned to step in and say, “ok, here’s what you’re going to need to complete this project,” and we can then ramp up a team to assist.We’ve had great success with this approach with a variety of clients, and we’d love to work with you on it. Thank you.AM: Thanks for listening to this week’s Secret Sauce! For more great tips, follow us on twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. 

This time we're joined by Palantir.net Engineer Kelsey Betham who tells us all about exporting features in drupal, including why and when you should, and how doing so could be a huge benefit should something go horribly wrong with your site. The full transcript of the episode is below.We'll be back next week with another episode of the Secret Sauce hosted by Account Manager Allison Manley, but for now subscribe to all of our episodes – including our monthly long-form interview series called On the Air With Palantir – over on iTunes.TranscriptAM: Hello and welcome to The Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is a super short podcast, just a few minutes every week, that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from Kelsey Betham, one of our fantastic engineers, who is going to talk about exporting your features in drupal.KB: Hi. I’m Kelsey Bentham and I’m going to tell you about why should should export all of your features. This seems like the sort of thing you don’t need to do after you launch your site. But you’d be wrong, because at some point or another someone else is going to have to set up your site. Whether it’s because they are fixing a bug, or they are learning how it works, they’ll need to know what’s going on. And if you don’t keep your features up to date and exported, the only place that information will exist will be in your database. And there’s a chance that something, somewhere, will go horribly wrong, and you want to have it backed up in as many ways as you can manage. And you can backup your features by going in through the Drupal Admin interface. You can log in with a user that has the appropriate permissions to update your features. Go to the “Configuration” menu on your Drupal site and go to “Features.” Here you will find a helpful list of all of your features and their current status: whether they be up to date with your database, or in some way different. If you have the Diff Module installed you can also check to see exactly how the code differs from the database. You’ll want to check on this to see exactly what’s changed and be able to verify that all the changes that have been made are changes that you actually want to keep. Once you verify that all the changes you have are ones that you should have, you can go and click on the “Recreate the Feature” button. This will allow you to export the feature to exactly where it is, but updated with all your current configurations.Doing this sort of thing will help in the long run because it makes it much much easier to ramp people up on projects, as well as keeping anyone outside of the immediate project team aware of exactly how things are working at any given time. Thank you very much for listening, and I hope that you keep all of your features updated in the future!AM: Thanks for listening to this week’s Secret Sauce! For more great tips, follow us on twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a great day! 

This is the first in our weekly bonus podcast that deals with shorter tips and resources that will help you with some straightforward facet of your web project. It's a compliment to our monthly, long-form podcast On the Air With Palantir.That's why we call it the Secret Sauce.Some episodes will focus on strategy, design, metrics, or other such topics, while others will be more technical in nature. Whatever the focus, we want these to be useful for you, so we draw from our real world experience.This time around Allison Manley lets Larry Garfield take the mic to talk about Drupal 8, how you can prepare for it properly, and how the changes in this new version push us toward a content strategy approach. While applicable to anyone considering Drupal 8, this particular episode is mostly technical in nature and geared more toward site builders and developers.Look for the Secret Sauce bonus podcast released weekly on Tuesdays.

We're very excited to kick-off our new podcast called On the Air with Palantir, and welcome you to listen to our first episode with Andy Gradel and Christine Fagan from Main Line Health System (new site not yet launched).In this episode, our resident podcast veteran Allison Manley discusses the project, the importance of analytics data and developing a sound strategy, user-tested decisions, design, platform challenges, and much more with our stellar client stakeholders.Look for this interview-style format monthly on the second Thursday of the month, with accompanying short form installments that provide tips, resources, and other quick information via our Secret Sauce podcast every Tuesday. We'll update our iTunes link above once it goes live there.Want to learn more about our services, and how we drive success through strategy and design for our clients? We're ready to help.And do you like what you hear, and are you a client or partner of Palantir interested in being on the podcast? Let us know!

February 2014An interview with the legendary Dick Button. What hasn't he done? He's practically the father of our sport (if Jackson Haines were Grandfather). The two-time Olympic Gold medalist invented many of the jumps and spins we see today, and he invented figure skating commentary. He's a skater, producer, commentator, actor, truth-seeker, hall-of-famer, stirrer-upper, and figure skating's biggest fan. This first episode focuses on his new book Push Dick's Button, a fantastic book that is a really wonderful conversation on skating. 55 minutes, 50 seconds. [display_podcast] AM: Allison ManleyDB: Dick Button AM:  Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Manleywoman Skatecast. I'm your host, Allison Manley, and this is Episode 73, an interview with Dick Button. That's right!  You heard it, here it is! Any longtime fan of my podcast knows I have been chasing this interview for years. Years! And it only took writing a poem, some polite stalking, a pinch of begging, and quite a bit of persistence and tenacity — and let's face it, it doesn't hurt that he was trying to spread the word about his new book. All I know is that I'm thrilled to have been finally able to interview him. So, in case you don't know his many accomplishments, I'm going to list them off first. Here is the general overview of what Dick Button has done for this sport. He was the first skater to have won the men's novice, junior and senior titles in three consecutive years. He was the first skater to land a double axel. He was the first skater to land a triple jump, which was a triple loop, and the first male skater to perform a camel spin. And he was the inventor of the flying camel spin, also known as the Button camel. He's the only American to win the European title. He's the first American world champion, the first American to win the Olympic title in figure skating, the first and only American back-to-back champion. He is the first and only American skater to simultaneously hold all of the following titles: national, North American, European, World and Olympic. That's five. He's the youngest man to win the Olympic title in figure skating, at age 18, and it shocks me still that this record stands today. He is the winner of the Sullivan Award. In the 1960s he began doing television commentary, and has been gracing our television sets for decades since. He was inducted into the World Skating Hall of Fame in 1976, which was the initial class. He won an Emmy Award in 1981 for outstanding sports personality/analyst. He was a producer of skating shows including The Superstars, which was the first of the reality shows. He starred in movies and on television, and on the stage. The autobiography he wrote in 1955 is a fount of knowledge, and is incredibly well written. I highly recommend that you all find a copy and give it a read. And, of course, he is the author very recently of Push Dick's Button, a fantastic book that is a really wonderful conversation on skating. Dick and I decided to do this interview in two parts. The first will be focused on his book and all the ideas within. The second part will focus more on his career and life in skating, and will follow at a later date to be determined.  Anyone who knows my podcast knows that I've been dying to capture his voice on tape for the fans. So, ladies and gentlemen, may I present — Dick Button. ----- AM:  All right, Dick Button, are you ready? DB: I am. AM: So, thank you so much for your book. It's wonderful. I have to ask, why did you write it at this time? DB: And my question to you is, what do you mean by “at this time”? Are you saying that I'm a very old poop [laughs] and therefore don't have any understanding of what the hell is going on in today's world? Or are you asking it because it's been a long time since I have written? I wrote a book in 1952 or 1954, when I was a very young person, and then I did one other paperback kind of book a couple of years later. I don't understand the question “at this time”?  I mean, that does that mean? Am I missing something? AM: I guess it is curious that it has been such a long time. I do actually have the book from the 1950s, and I think it's interesting that the book that you chose to release now, rather than being a biography or an autobiography, is such a conversational book. So I suspect that you felt the need to have this conversation, so that's why I'm asking. Is skating frustrating you to the point where you felt like you had to tell these opinions? DB: I'll tell you what it really is. Number one, it was in the past exceedingly difficult for me to write. The advent of the computer and the lectures that I give on gardening introduced me to an entire new way to write. If you write on your computer, you can erase things, you can change things, you can move things around, and you don't have to rewrite painfully every single word. So the system and the ability to write was exceedingly pleasant. Then I also have a very good friend who had gotten me a major contract ten years ago, that was with Simon and Schuster, and I had a great opportunity to write a very good book at a very high-priced contract. And that was at the same time that I had gone skating on New Year's Eve, and fell and fractured my skull, and got concussions and lost the hearing in my left ear. And I also had a co-writer with me, and it didn't work. We just didn't work out. In other words, it was too much. I couldn't handle it at that time. It took me about two or three years to really get my act together and to recoup from that fall. So the important thing was, this same lady, who is a great friend of mine and who got me that contract, her name is Pat Eisemann-Logan — I finally said to her, Pat, what can I do for you? And she said, I'll tell you what you can do. I would like it if you would come and sit on the couch next to me and tell me what the heck is going on with what we are watching. So I sat down one day and I just wrote out a couple of things, a few chapters, and she said, yeah, that's terrific. And I love it because, number one, it doesn't have to be The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire of Skating. It is a simple conversation. Conversations are meant to be interrupted, to have answers, to have somebody kvetch about it. Conversations can range from any subject to any subject, and that's why I like the idea of this. I did not want to do a history of skating, which others have done before this, and I did not wish to do a biography. I think there's far too much more of great interest around the world of skating. I wanted to do what subjects came up to my mind, what it is to watch for at the Olympics, and most of the questions you've asked me about this are  all in that book. So it was a very pleasant experience for me, I enjoyed it no end, and I'm happy to have done it and done it the way I did. Although I will tell you that there are three books that you write and three skating programs that you skate and three pictures that you paint.  They are, number one, the book you plan, number two, the book you do, and number three, the book you wish you'd done [laughs]. So if you can put up with that, you're a good gal. AM: It does seem to have worked out that this is the book you wish you had done. You seem very pleased with it. DB: Oh, yes, but there's a lot of things that I . . .  listen, if I had started with all the things I made notes of, I would have had six more volumes [laughs]. I don't think so. AM: Well, I do love the fact that even though it's not biographical, that you have a lot of sprinklings of your history in there. I mean, I think that's a great addition to the opinion pieces that are in there, because there's definitely opinions in there as well. DB: Well, it's a conversation. It covers whatever's on your mind. The one chapter that many people have criticized, they say, we know what jumps are, you don't have to put a chapter in there saying the different jumps. But my doctor said to me, "Dick, my daughter skates and we all really like watching the skating, but I can't tell one jump from another, how can I do that?" And it annoyed him. So I put in this brief explanation, if you don't know what a jump is, there's three or four or five or six pages of it, and if you already know which jumps are which — skip over it! This is not the end of the world book. This is not the end of the world subject. It is a conversational piece. And I hope like the devil that people can figure out that they can learn something from it. Because I enjoyed very much doing it. AM: Well, great. And I do want to ask you some questions about it, obviously without giving away too much, because people should buy it and read it, of course [laughs]. DB: [laughs] Well, we don't have long enough on this conversation, so go ahead and spring your questions. AM: Well, one of the things you are concerned about is losing the theatrical part of skating. And I wonder, from a competitive standpoint, how you think it can be preserved. There are a lot of people trying to preserve it outside of competition, but in the competitive arena, what are your thoughts on that? DB: Let me also start out by saying that competition, the Olympic Games which we're about to start into in another day or two — they get the most audience. Figure skating and dancing, they're kissing cousins, and figure skaters have the opportunity to become instantly famous and household names. Dancers don't have that. So if a figure skater has that opportunity, and the Olympic competition is there, it's marvelous that they take part and do it. However, figure skating is a complete sport. It's a sport that has music, choreography, costuming, performance level, story level — it has so many different aspects that are intimately intertwined with each other. Figure skating is theatre, and I don't care who tells me that it's not. The head of the ISU, the head of the Olympic Committee, and a lot of guys get all honked about it and say it's not a sport. Well, don't watch it! If you think it's not a sport, don't watch it, and I couldn't care less. However, the point is very simply that it is all of these things. It is theatre, it always has been theatre, and it will always continue to be theatre. And that is the very reason that makes it so popular at the Olympic Games. Now the reason I'm saying this is, there's an old saying that Oleg Protopopov used to tell me all the time, and that was, “Deek! Deek! You cannot have artistry without technique. But neither can you have technique without artistry”. The old votes, the old judging system had two marks. They were for technical merit and for artistic impression. The new marks, in essence, if you really want to see what the icing on top of the cake is, the subterfuge of it all, is they have all the marks that you get on your point system first, and then they have the component scores. Have you ever read the component scores? AM: I have. DB: Then you know that they mix together choreography, step sequences, footwork, et cetera, et cetera, and they have something like 27 or 28 different criteria to figure and allot to a skater's program within about two seconds. That's almost an impossible thing. And also, you will never know what it's about because it's secret. All I'm saying is that yes, there are many other organizations — there's Disney on Ice and Stars on Ice and individual singles skating here and there, and there's ensemble skating with the Ice Theatre of New York, and there's synchronized skating, and there's all kind of things. But it's the theatrical performance level that mesmerizes us. I mean, why did we look at Katarina Witt? Not only was she sensational looking, but she had personality and pizzazz. Let me ask you a question. Why is Evgeni Plushenko such a hot subject? I'll tell you why. Because he has personality. He's a great jumper, not a great spinner. But he has personality. He has pizzazz. And you can't take your eyes off him, watching what he's going to do. He will bamboozle you with his wrist movements . . . AM: He'll make you think he's skating with those wrist movements [laughs]. DB: Of course, I've seen him do that half a dozen times. He stops and does a bunch of fancy wrist movements around his belt line, and that's supposed to be great theatrical skating or something. Let me tell you something. Who is it that you want to watch at this Olympic Games? Who is it they are looking forward to watching? AM: Jeremy Abbott and Jason Brown. DB: You mean you want to see the competition between them. AM: The competition between them, but I think both are so wonderful. They bring something so different. DB: Absolutely right. And so do half a dozen of these skaters. I think what you really want to see also is Davis and White and how they impact the show. And who do we remember out of the past? Come on, you remember the stars that had pizzazz, that had presence, that grabbed you. There's a whole chapter in my book there about entrances and exits, and it's all about the difference between an Irina Slutskaya entering the skating arena — the first thing she does is skate over to her coach, takes a swig of water, high fives her coach, and adjusts the pants on her dress. And the next thing she does is blow her nose. Now, come on, is that theatre? That's not a humdinger of an entrance. The point is that, how does Katarina Witt do it? She doesn't lose for one moment the presence, the theatre aspect of it. And the gal we remember most of those two has gotta be Katarina Witt. And that's why there's a chapter in the book called "Where Are You When We Need You, Katarina Witt?" And . . . what else can I tell you? [laughs] This is my favorite rant. AM: You're passionate and I love it. I love every minute of it. DB: Well, come on, you know, it's a fun activity. It's a very complicated activity. It has so many elements to it that you simply cannot avoid any one of them. And the level of performance is one of those characteristics. AM: Yes. Well, you are a vocal critic of the judging system, but I am curious because you have said that there are parts of it that you think are worth preserving. What parts would that be? DB: Well, for example, I think you should always have a markdown if you fall. Right now what we are seeing is — how many people fell in the last [2014] National Championship, both men and women, in the different parts. How many people fall down? AM: Not a lot this year, actually. DB: Well, Ashley Wagner, she did. But you're being rewarded if you do a quadruple jump and you fall down but you're rotated almost enough to complete the thing in the air. This is all part of Ottavio Cinquanta's desire to — if he had his way, he would not have any judges there at all, and it would all be based on points and timing. I would like the fact that there would be no reward at all for a fall. And a deduction if you fall down.  I write about this in my book, there was a communiqué from the ISU explaining what falls were. You don't know what a fall is, I don't know what a fall is, certainly. But this rule came out and then three months later, there was — I mean, the question was, what part of the body was the fall on, was it on your bottom, was it on your core, and if you were on your fanny, were you on one buttock or another buttock or were you on both buttocks [laughs]. And then along came three months later this explanation, this clarification, and then changes to the rule that explained what a fall was [laughs]. So you have to read all that to understand the sense of the nit-picking. Now listen, let me tell you something else, and I write about this in the book . I challenge you to count — take one of the ladies anywhere, not necessarily Ashley Wagner, but start with a young lady and start counting the number of times when they're doing step sequences and all of those wonderful things, where they raise either one or the other or both arms over the level of their shoulders. And if you start counting, my bet is that you will get to 20 very, very quickly, and then you can stop. They're like flailing windmills. That's exactly the point. That does not augur well, in my book. First of all, there's just gotta be less talk about it. Why do you have to have something that is exactly two minutes with so many seconds on either end of it? That isn't the way. You should have one program that is your technical program, and one program that is your creative or other program, but neither one should be acceptable or be able to be marked well unless it has the qualities of the other one. One should be of technical merit and one should be of — the old judging captions, artistic impression, they are in a sense that way now, they're just called something different, it's technical marks and the program components. AM: So I wonder, you do outline at the end of the book your wishes and suggestions for better scoring, and they do include that the two programs should be different and that there shouldn't be a time limit. DB: Put it this way, there should be a time limit, but a generous one. I mean, during the World Professional Championships, we recorded the length of time of every skater, and only once did somebody ever go over, I think, maybe four and a half or five minutes.  So if you have three and a half minutes or four minutes, a generous thing — what difference does it make? Why do you just have to limit yourself? This is just the one program, not the technical program, the artistic impression program. AM: Well, I'm curious, what do the powers that be think about your ideas? Have you gotten any feedback? DB: No, I don't have feedback, because they . . . Ottavio Cinquanta does not want any subjective judging there. Remember, he is a speed skater, and all he can see — number one, he has two goals to his agenda. And once you understand a man's agenda, you will understand what he will do. His agenda is to have, number one, to never have another scandal like we had in Salt Lake at the pairs skating competition. And number two, he's all for eliminating anything subjective about the sport. He would like it to be like speed skating. You get over the line first, you've won. Now that is not figure skating. And besides he's said it too many times, and he's the one who put the new rules system in. My chapters go into all of that and show the chicanery that was involved with it. And now because he [laughs] made a contractual offer and placed every officer in their position for an additional period of time, he will now remain as head of the ISU until the year 2016. It's a chapter in the book as well. AM: You have always been an advocate for great spinning. You've talked about Dorothy Hamill, Lucinda Ruh, Ronnie Robertson, so I have to wonder, that in the new judging system, it has to be nice that at least you see the spins getting rewarded even if you don't always love the positions. DB: Well, I find that the multiple levels — you know, everything that you look at, there's a grade of execution, there's a level of difficulty. If you add more moves and turns into your spin, you get more points. But nobody gets points for blurred spinning. Nobody gets points for the things that used to make the audience stand on their feet and cheer. Spinning is just as important as jumping, and it's one of the two major technical elements in skating, the other being jumping and then of course there's spinning. And when you see somebody moving from position to position and changing their edges, all that sort of thing, you're not looking at the spin. At least have one spin that reflects the total true quality of a fast, delayed, long lived spin, where everything counters on the centering and everything counters on the blurring of it and on the finishing of it. Look, I don't have to have everything that I like, it's what other people like too, but I will tell you, there's very little to cheer for when you get a 243.8 personal best score. That doesn't give the average person an understanding of what the heck the score is all about, except that somebody else can get 283.9. And I trust that was more than the first number I gave [laughs]. AM: Well, I've actually always wanted that. I've always wanted there to be at least one spin that was skaters' choice, if you will, that they could do just for choreographic effect. Just like they've finally done with the step sequences, where you can just do one that you don't have to do without so many turns and flailing and windmilling, but it's one that just works with the music. DB: Well, there's very little — you can't really create things that are unusual or unexpected or different and expect to get anywhere under the current judging system. AM: Well, you have of course mentioned before that the ISU needs to be split, that skating shouldn't be run by a speed skater any longer. It's going to be a while, of course, since Ottavio wrote his own contract . . . DB: Well, of course he did, and nobody stood up to him. Nobody was able to stand up to him because he has cultivated so many federations which are all speed skating federations which get their money from figure skating. So what do they care? Why would they care what the rules for figure skating are, any more than a figure skater would care less whether the speed skating race is another 50 meters or not?  That's up to the speed skaters to understand that. And the very fact that they — did you know that there are over 80 federations in the world of skating? AM: I didn't know there were that many. DB: Over 80, and most of them all — the majority either are speed skating or joint speed skating and figure skating. And they get money from figure skating, the ISU pays them money from figure skating. And the end result is that of course they're going to do what he wants. AM: Do you think there's anyone out there right now who can challenge him, who can be the next great leader, to separate the two? DB: I think probably everybody is scared beyond belief. You see, the impact of the Olympic Games is always the most publicized event, but I can guarantee you, even the world championships which are taking place after the Olympic Games, they're not going to be on live. They're going to be in about two weeks in a summary program on NBC. Now maybe there's some obscure cable system or Ice Network that will show them, but you have to buy that cable system. I'm sure there will be recordings of it. But [laughs] here's a world championship that will be coming up a month later than the Olympic Games. Wouldn't you think it should deserve — and it used to always be very much of a highlight. Now it's sloughed off and it's shown a week or two weeks later after the world championship is over. I don't like that. AM: I don't either. All right, well, let's move on from the judging and talk about which skaters for you right now are really exciting. You've mentioned Davis and White. DB: Well, look, let me tell you something. My book covers a point about to wilt or not to wilt. When you have somebody who simply does not wilt, that in itself is exciting. And many a time, those people that can rise to the occasion, and suddenly pull together a program that is phenomenal — it's what you want to see. I mean, I found myself rising out of my seat when Jason Brown performed, because he in a sense broke the rules. It will be very interesting to see how he fares in this international competition, when he has competition from not only Jeremy Abbott but from Chan, Plushenko, Denis Ten, Javier Fernandez, and the Japanese skaters. It'll be very interesting to see how he compares in that to them. Remember, the national championship is one where it's a single country. And there aren't countries that are vying to improve their lot because that's the way they get money from the ISU. It's a different situation. I hope like the devil that he does brilliantly. I find him a fascinating skater and I was entranced by the choreography. And the choreography was done by Rohene Ward. I remember talking to him a couple of years ago, saying, you are going to keep on skating, aren't you? And he said, no, I'm not. And I felt that was a great loss. I'm very happy now to see him back in force as a choreographer. AM: Yes. And I'm happy to see someone, that he has a student that can interpret that choreography so well. Because, you know, Rohene was a very unusual talent, and oddly enough Jason has a lot of the same qualities, with his extreme flexibility and his showmanship. DB: Wait a minute. Are you telling me that that flexibility can't be gained by other people? They can, if they would understand what that is and follow that. AM: No, but I think Rohene was very unusual for a male skater to be able to use it to choreographic effect. DB: Why as a male skater? AM: Well, because most men, if they could do the splits like that, they certainly wouldn't lower themselves on the ice and pull themselves back up and do a lot of — Johnny Weir could lift his leg all the way up before a lutz, too, just like Jason and Rohene can, but it is unusual. DB: Well, that's because they don't follow that either. If you look at the number of skaters among the ladies that – well, look, there's a totally developable way. Guys can learn. You see it in gymnastics, for heaven's sake, If they do it, why can't figure skaters? Look, this is called the development of the — right now, I can guarantee you there's very, very little of the component score voting for some of the stuff that Jason Brown did. He was marvelous in the fact that he did not open his program with the single most difficult jump that he could. I'm really fascinated to see how the international version of this will work out, the international competition coming up in the Olympic Games. AM: So you did mention that he is a bit of a rule breaker in that sense, and you have said in your book that rules are made to be broken. And you did use Torvill and Dean as a perfect example of that, of course, from 1984. Is there a rule that you see right now that you wish someone would break, or push a little more? DB: Yeah. If you look at the rules of the component scores, you will see that, number one, they include skating skills, transitions/linking footwork and movement, performance and execution, choreography, and composition. Now what is the difference between choreography and composition, and transitional and linking footwork and movement, et cetera? I mean, aren't these the same things? AM: To me they are. To me it's semantics. DB: That's right. And isn't it better to have a skater develop that through their own intelligence rather than having to control those step sequences through it? And the linking movement and the linking footwork? And the transitions and the linking movement? [laughs].There was a wonderful English lady who would always comment on English television, and she had a very high voice, and when it came out, linking movements, we were all happily amused [laughs]. AM: Well, that's a good challenge for the next person listening to this, to try to push those boundaries a little bit per Dick Button's request. All right. So, you have a chapter on music choices, and there are a lot of choices as you know that are constantly overused and that we are all tired of hearing about. So is there a piece of music that you have never gotten tired of hearing, that you feel is underutilized? DB: Look, these pieces of music are time-honored pieces of music. So if you look at, for example, Swan Lake, I still will go, when I go to the theatre in the winter time, I still will go to New York City and see Swan Lake. I mean, it doesn't stop any more than certain songs that you get tired of. It is the way they're developed, and I do a whole thing in this book on the development of music by the skater, and whether they understand what the music is saying. And when you pick a piece of music like Carmen or Swan Lake, it comes with over a hundred years — one comes with much more than a hundred years and one comes from close to a hundred years — of very fine history and development and interpretation. Are you telling me that because six skaters do it within a two-year period of time that you're tired of it? I find it's that the skater hasn't developed it. We're always seeing different interpretations of dance, and if you get tired of Swan Lake being done, then try to bring a great quality into it that makes it sing. Swan Lake is wonderful for skating because it has long sweeping movements. It is not Irish clog dancing or step dancing. AM: Well, I think if you're going to pick, and this is my opinion, but I think if you're going to pick one of the commonly used pieces, you better make it good and different and that's what I think — Samantha Cesario, I don't know if you saw her program, when she did it this year at Nationals I thought it was fantastic. And I am not a fan of using Carmen because I think that after Debi Thomas and Katarina Witt had the battle of the Carmens, you'd better leave Carmen pretty dead. You know? [laughs] DB: But one of the things is, you have to understand what the music is. I write about this in the book, and I talk about Mao Asada who is a lovely skater and a very nice person. But she had all the white feathers and all the music, et cetera, but there was no understanding of the movement of a swan in that. There was no understanding of the history of Swan Lake. I mean, you can't have a program that has been performed for more than one hundred years now, nearly one and a half centuries, in great companies with great choreography and great sweeping music, and not understand what that performance level is. You must understand the music, you must be able to — and there are different interpretations of the music, different orchestrations, there are many times different ones. Whatever the piece of music it is that you choose, you can find sometimes more than one interpretation, and unfortunately we don't hear about that on the commentary, I don't think. AM: Is there a piece of music you would like to hear more? DB: Look, that's like saying is there a great skater that I'd like to see more of. Always! Always.  I like great skating. That's all I'm saying, I like the best. And I want to be — it's theatre, it's athletic ability, it's competition, it's technical demands, it's music, it's choreography, it's costuming, it's the whole kit and caboodle. And I guarantee you, do you think they're going to cut out — I wouldn't be at all surprised, if Ottavio Cinquanta had his way, that he would make everybody wear the same costume for the team competition. AM: They were talking about that. One of the articles this week was talking about putting all the athletes in Nike outfits [laughs]. DB: Yeah, yeah, yeah, remind me of one event I don't want to see if that's the case [laughs]. Oh, gawd. If you have a great product, don't mess with it. Skating was a great product. Now we've messed with it so completely and for so long that it's very disheartening. Remember, you're not a member of the rules committee if you're not making rules. If you're a rule maker, you have to be making rules or otherwise you're not a rule maker. AM: [laughs] They got a little over-zealous. All right. Your commentary is epic. People still talk about it, they miss hearing you, your catchphrases have inspired a drinking game and compilations on YouTube. And you have gotten some heat for your comments such as “refrigerator break”. DB: I'd like to address that. What the heck, would it have been better if I had said, it will give you an opportunity to make a toilet break? I don't think so. A refrigerator break — you know, I think I got over 1100 letters from people saying that I had only said that, I wouldn't have said that if this, that, and the other thing. And I wrote each one of them back and I said, look, Angela Nikodinov was a very talented skater, but she was skating against Michelle Kwan, and there is no problem coming in second behind Michelle Kwan, but she was coming in fifth, fourth, second, third, fourth, that sort of thing, floating around. But what she allowed you to do was to lose your sense of concentration on her. That's where performance level comes in. She was a gorgeous, lovely skater, with wonderful technique and very, very beautiful on the ice. But she allowed you to lose your sense of concentration. She allowed you to switch off and take a refrigerator break. And after I answered that, I never heard anything more about it. AM: But she did listen to you, though. Because she came back amazing the next year. She made you pay attention. DB: [laughs] Well, that's my gold medal. My gold medal is when I hear, when I make a criticism of somebody and then I see later that they have either improved it or changed it. One of the things I always said about Evgeni Plushenko was, way back in 2002, I said, he's a wonderful jumper but he's a lousy spinner. And the next year, or two years, I was at a championship, and he said, how are my spins? Are they better? So he was listening, and he made it good. And his spins were better. And that's a great compliment to me, when somebody does that. AM: So how many skaters would you say have come up to you and talked to you about your comments about their performance? DB: Well, I had a lot of skaters say, can you point it out to me. One of them was Jason Dungjen and his partner, Kyoko Ina. Kyoko Ina had exquisite posture and stretch and arching of the back, and Jason was like a nice all-American skater without that same stretch. So when they did a pair move, hers was extended beautifully and his was not parallel to it. As soon as I pointed that out to him, he understood exactly what I was talking about, and I think they worked hard on it. So that was a great honor to me. That is my gold medal, my reward, when a skater will do that. And look, you really only criticize, I say this in the book, you really only criticize a skater if they're talented. If they're not talented, it doesn't spark comment. AM: Would you say the refrigerator break comment was the largest reaction you've gotten over the years from fans, or was there another one? DB: It was one of them. Another one of them was when I commented one time about, I think it was crossing the street in New York, and everybody said, oh, you wouldn't have said that if the skater that I was referring to wasn't black. And come on, I encourage my kids to cross the street, I say, stop and look in both directions, otherwise you'll get run over and then you'll look like a pancake on that road. It's about an awareness of your surroundings, and you've got to be aware of the surrounding effect in an arena. How many times do you see — go back and look at programs. That's why some day I would like to see a great media museum of skating. Because if you go back and you look at these performances and you consider them, then you will never forget that. And it will apply itself, it will be another basis for another understanding of what it is that you're doing. Every position you take on the ice should be thought out. You cannot just do these positions where you see the skater come out and they take their position and the free leg toe is pointed behind and to the side of the skating leg — you know, the kind of position you take where one foot is flat on the ice and the other is on a point behind you. Look at the number of times you see, what is the position of that foot? Is it turned under, or is it not in an elegant position? If you want to see proper position, look at Oleg and Ludmila Protopopov, and John Curry, and Janet Lynn, and Peggy Fleming. And Dorothy Hamill, who became an infinitely better skater after she had won the Olympics. I was a better skater after I had finally learned, long after I had retired, and learned from — there's a whole chapter in this, it's called "Open Your Eyes, Dummy." And it was my opening my eyes which led me finally to understand what the heck skating was all about. AM: Well, I would love it if we finally had a media museum with all those performances. DB: There is the museum in Colorado Springs, but it doesn't have any money. US Figure Skating is not really going to support it because they want to support skating today. But sometimes the education, the media education is imperative. AM: Yes. Well, I am hopeful that one day will come to fruition, that there will be a central place where all that is housed, and it's not just Youtube [laughs]. So, all right, your book, I sort of felt like as I was reading it, and this is sort of getting heavy here, I really felt that it was a metaphor for living a balanced and fulfilling life. It talks about centering yourself, breaking the rules, having a solid foundation, fighting the good fight, not wilting under pressure, and having a whole lot of fun. Do you view skating that way? DB: Yep. You know, skating is no different than gardening, than painting, than anything else. You know, I hope you'll come some day and see my garden lecture [laughs]. Then you can do a conversation on that for a different sport. But all of these things intertwine. Why do you dress the way you do? Why do you speak the way you do? Why do you live in a house, if you have the opportunity to live in a house, why do you choose the style of house you do? All of these are inherent in skating, and they are inherent in everything else. It is called not only what the eye beholds, it's what the eye registers. One of my pet peeves is watching skaters take position in the center of the ice, when they skate down and they're on one foot, and the other knee is bent. Time after time, you look at that particular entrance move on one foot, and it's not a beautiful move, but yet there is every skater doing it. What is that move, what is that position supposed to be? If you ask the skater, what are you trying to express by that, are you expressing a welcoming moment to the crowd? You don't have to be on one foot to do that. Take a look at it yourself, and I urge all your listeners to take a look at that, and take a look at the number of times an arm flings above the shoulder. And question each and every one. Peggy Fleming, always, I would see her in front of a mirror at a rink, constantly checking out the way she finished a turn or a pirouette, or made a turn, and how the dress worked with it. She was constantly looking at that. And you will find that she does not make a move even today without knowing exactly what that position is, whether she's on skates or not. Ludmila and Oleg Protopopov, and I talk about this in the book, I went up to Lake Placid where they were getting a lifetime achievement award, and of course the Lake Placid club or whoever it was didn't have any money for publicizing it, and it was an almost empty arena. However, the Protopopovs skated in it as if they were skating for the King and Queen of England. And Oleg took an opening position with Ludmila, and you take one look — without them moving one inch, they took a position, and I said, that's it, that's their whole performance right there in that position.  They were stunningly beautiful in that position. And they're well into their 70s, and there was the story, right there. My problem is, I can't look at skating — that's one of the sickening things with having watched it for so long, is that I've seen extraordinary performances, Belita Jepson-Turner, Noffke and Schubach, pairs skaters who were champions of the US in the 40s, the movement, their parallelism of their moves was extraordinary. They couldn't do throw axels and they couldn't know what triple side-by-side jumps were and so forth, but their pair skating quality was without compare. I mean, it was just extraordinary. All I'm asking the skaters to do, and everybody else to do, is to look at it, and say, why are we doing this? Each step, what is it supposed to do, and is it? Does it interpret the music and does it interpret — John Curry, we did a thing with Ice Theatre of New York, Dance on Camera, at Lincoln Centre over the weekend, and it was all about, it was a great deal of comment and production in the John Curry film of what he was teaching skaters and the way he was making them look at film. Slavka Kohout used to do that. She would take all her dancers in to see the ballet, or any other production that had dance movement in it. It wasn't about seeing it, it was about registering it. And that's the important thing. If there's only one thing I hope for in this book, with a little bit of tomfoolery that you don't get stuck into something serious, and, number two, that it opens your eyes. AM: I love that. All right, I just have one more question for you, then, since we are just days away from the Olympics. I am curious what you think about the new team event. DB: Oh, I don't really think much about it at all one way or the other. I think if they want to do it, that's fine. It gives a secondary skater a secondary choice, and it gives somebody who may not win a medal another chance to win a medal, and I'm fine with that. I don't have any great problem with it. You know, God bless them, what they're doing is trying to get another set of television exposure, and that produces money and blah blah blah. The one thing, though, that I did understand was that when the rules were not quite set in Budapest, at the European championships, the newspaper people were asking Ottavio Cinquanta what was the rule about such and such, and he said he didn't know. He said, you have to ask the Russians about that. Well, hello! Are the Russians the ones that are controlling the sport? I mean, the Russians are a hell of a good skaters, and very efficient, and they've got a wonderful team going, but are they the arbiters of our sport? That's my complaint. “I am a speed skater, I know nothing about figure skating.” AM: I know, it's incredible. Well, I agree with you that it's wonderful that there's another opportunity for skaters to get medals, because there's just been the one chance all these decades. But I also don't think that it was done for any reason other than ratings and money. I'm cynical enough for that. But I'm glad to see the skaters get another opportunity. DB: Right. But you've also got to remember that that's why figures are no longer with us. They didn't bring in any money, nobody watched them, they took a lot of time, they were expensive, and they didn't add anything to the income. So this is another one that adds to the income, and it really doesn't change anything. I'm sure they'll all do their same programs that they will do again. They're not going to create a new program now. They might for another year. AM: Maybe for the next round. But we'll see. To be determined [laughs]. Well, I am going to take you up on your offer and invite myself to one of your garden lectures someday. DB: [laughs]. All right. I just finished one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and one at the Botanic Garden in Arizona, and I've done several in the New York area, in the New York and Connecticut area, and maybe there'll be one in the early spring or so in a nearby city to New York. So I'll let you know. AM: Please! And as we've discussed I'm hoping to come out and see you in a couple of weeks, and do another interview more about you. DB: Good. AM: And I hope that you'll let me come up and take a look at your fantastic art collection of skating art. DB: Oh, you're more than welcome. AM: I would love it. DB: You're more than welcome. You have a good one, my dear, and keep the faith. AM: You too. Enjoy the next couple of weeks of good television. DB: Thank you, ma'am.   AM: And there it is. I have finally had my dream of interviewing Dick Button. I can now die happy. I think. Although, as you heard, he did want to have another conversation later. So we will plan to do that. And until next time —May you be a pioneer with whatever you choose to do. May you be as opinionated and passionate about your life's work as Dick Button is about his life's work. And as he says in his new book Push Dick's Button, on page 46, and yes, I'm paraphrasing just a little bit: don't skate to Carmen. Bye-bye!

Listen to this 15-minute interview, where Allison Manley, from Rogue Element, answers these questions: How much time it takes to do the proposals and how they decide which ones to do. What to do if the prospect isn't responsive during the proposal process. What if you don't have access to the people involved in the actual project, as happens a lot with higher ed and government agencies? Why they present the pricing in 2 pages (overview and detail) in the proposal and how much detail is necessary. How much self promotion they include and the thinking behind it. How and when they decide how to include terms and conditions (T&C) in the proposal or the contract. (See what a good T&C that's been vetted by a lawyer looks like.) Want 11 sample proposals to use as examples? Buy the Designer's Proposal Bundle. 

figure skating podcast interviewJANUARY 2009 A compilation of interviews with various skaters and fans from the 2009 US National Championships in Cleveland, Ohio. 19 minutes, 3 seconds. Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights: Allison Manley, podcast host: I unfortunately was not able to make it to Nationals this year, new baby and all, but you [...]

This Week in Skating is hosted by Gina Capellazzi and Daphne Backman and is a cooperative project between Figure Skaters Online and Ice-dance.com. New episodes are available every Tuesday.Website: http://www.thisweekinskating.comEmail: thisweekinskating@gmail.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/thisweekinskatingTwitter: https://www.twitter.com/thiswkinskatingInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinskating_________________________________________EPISODE NOTESEvent Results BriefPhiladelphia Summer International Philadelphia Summer ChampionshipsQuebec Summer Championships The 2022 National Showcase competitionSilicon Valley OpenCup of Colorado Scott Hamilton InvitationalGeneral Skating NewsISU posted the assignments for the second Junior Grand Prix event in Ostrava, Czech Republic. The ISU released a communication detailing with the number of competitor allotments for 2023 ISU ChampionshipsSkate Canada announced on Aug. 5 the end of the partnership of Evelyn Walsh and Trennt MichaudSkate Canada unveils new brand identityRecent InterviewsVictor Kraatz was on the “Today in BC” podcast.Allison Manley's podcast interview with Jackie Wong.Team USA did a feature story on Nathan Chen.Nathan Chen was also named 2023 FISU World University Games goodwill ambassadorNathan will be on the CBS show Secret Celebrity Renovation on Aug. 12 at 8 p.m. easternGolden Skate posted on YouTube an interview with Japan's Koshiro Shimada.International Figure Skating magazine did an interview with Eurosport commentator Mark Hanretty. U.S. Figure Skating posted an article with Hunter Widley - a figure skater and Miss South Dakota.Upcoming Events for the WeekCranberry Open will take place Aug. 10-14, 2022 at the Skating Club of Boston in Norwood, Mass. The competition is part of the National Qualifying Series for singles and pairs. Cranberry Cup International will take place that same week at the Skating Club of Boston - it is an international event for women, men on the junior and senior levels. Copper Cup, August 11-13, in Bountiful, Utah is a national qualifying series competition for singles.Japan's major summer competition, Gensan Summer Cup, is August 11-14.The Hungarian federation is holding a test skate in Budapest on Aug. 13 and 14. Segment - IDC and FSO spotlightIDC: Anne's take: 2022 Lake Placid Ice Dance Championships IDC: Lake Placid Ice Dance Championships PhotosIDC: Lake Placid Ice Dance International PhotosFSO: 2022 Philadelphia Summer International PhotosFSO: 2022 Lake Placid Ice Championships/International Photos