12 Reasons to Attend Acquia Engage

The Tech Talks at Acquia Engage have always been among the most popular sessions, so I'm excited to announce that for Acquia's upcoming Engage 2016 conference (Nov 1-3 in Boston) we've more than doubled the number of Tech Talks.

We recently released the final list of sessions, and there are twelve Tech Talks on the schedule (in addition to everything else). I'm excited to share why I think the conference is a must-attend event for developers who are evaluating, or currently working with Acquia or Drupal.

Accelerate your skills using Acquia products and Drupal

The ideal conference learning environment is one where a community gets together to discuss real-world approaches to the challenging problems we all face, with a willingness to share and learn from each other. That's what you'll find at Engage 2016: you'll be meeting with the Acquia team, our top Partners, and Acquia power users, to share best practices and tech tips on working together managing and building Drupal sites.

At Engage you'll learn how our leading clients and partners come together as teams across organizations to build software. There will be talks from industry leaders on best practices for developing software, we'll demo all the exciting new Developer Products Acquia has recently released, and give you insight into our Developer Products and Tools roadmap.

We'll demo, and you'll get a chance to meet with the team behind, the recently released Acquia BLT, an open source development tool for generating new Drupal projects using a template derived from the best practices of our Professional Services' team and our Partners. Our PS team now uses it on every project and we'll demonstrate how you, too, can meaningfully reduce the time and cost of setting up new projects. The cost savings of using BLT on your projects moving forward could cover the cost of sending your development leadership to Engage.

BLT is integrated with the recently announced Acquia Pipelines (now in private beta) and the Pipelines team will demo the new product and talk about how our beta users are establishing and enforcing development team workflows and best practices through Pipelines automation and governance of building, testing, and deploying sites on Acquia Cloud.

Engage is the place to get the latest information about Drupal 8, and learn about the future of Drupal development using D8 Lightning. Acquia identified key parts of the development experience that could be bundled into an open source distribution for developers and created D8 Lightning to meaningfully accelerate the development, maintenance, and QA of Drupal as an enterprise authoring platform.

There are a lot of questions and confusion around the idea of decoupling Drupal. Preston So will set the record straight and discuss exactly why, when, and how you should decouple Drupal… and when it is not the best approach.

We'll also have Cash Williams, one of Acquia's leading security experts on hand to discuss the many lessons we've learned in performing hundreds of load tests, performance, and security audits. He'll walk you through the most common issues we've encountered and what you can do to proactively protect your sites.

The team behind the new version of Lift, Acquia's personalization product, will be leading a number of sessions. Katherine Bailey and Dave Ingram will discuss the ways that Acquia is using and thinking about Data Science and Machine Learning. Melanie Poitras and Caitlan Checkett will outline how to craft a personalization strategy, and execute on it. Dave Ingram will also conduct a session that will describe Lift's new features in depth.

Not only are we building a lot of new tools and services to help you develop more complex sites faster as a team, we want work together with you on new innovative projects and ideas. Find out more about Acquia Labs - an exciting new initiative that aims to explore projects on the bleeding edge of innovation, to really move the needle forward in your organization. Come learn about our ongoing Labs projects, our forward-looking vision, and how Acquia Labs can help you open new channels, and engage your customers in novel ways.

There will be plenty of opportunity to mix it up with speakers and attendees. There's so much more going on at Engage, I can't cover it all in a short post! Want more details? Check out our Engage Tech Talks Agenda page. You can get an overview of the whole event here.

Hope to see you in early November, in Boston. I'm confident you'll come away with a lot of great ideas and solutions.

The details: November 1-3 | Boston Park Plaza Hotel | Boston MA. Registration and Pricing.