The countdown has begun! Drupal GovCon is only a week and a half away. We’re looking forward to seeing you all July 31st through August 2nd.

Every summer we send our team up to Bethesda to learn the latest in Drupal site building, front end development, user experience, and more.

This year, we went all out. We are one of the conference’s sponsors and a variety of members of our team will be speaking.

If you’re attending (and you should – it’s a free event, after all), stop by our booth and say hi. We can tell you why we love the Brick Factory, what neat projects we’ve been working on, and – this is very important – you can pick up our new DC Drupal t-shirt.

We’re also excited to announce that three members of our team will be speaking at DrupalGov Con. Make sure you add these sessions to your schedule:

Design Systems, Not Pages
Todd Zeigler, CEO – Tuesday 2:00pm

For most of the web’s short lifetime, the primary way to design a website has been to create wireframes and comps (design compositions) of a site’s key pages. This page-based approach is clearly broken.

In this session Todd will talk about how our team has transitioned to system-based design.  We design overall styles and repeating elements that make up pages, instead of the pages themselves. This process is quicker, easier for front-end developers to implement, and provides maximum flexibility.

The journey of a module from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8
Heymo Vehse, Developer – Wednesday 1:00pm

The release of Drupal 8 was over 1.5 years ago, and was an exciting step in the evolution of Drupal. That was a long time ago, yet there are still a lot of Drupal 7 modules with no (or no working) version for Drupal 8.

During this session, Heymo will give you the tools you need to migrate a Drupal 7 module over to Drupal 8. He’ll also dive into the code of one module so you can see the differences between 7 and 8.

Client Management: Building Happy, Healthy Client Relationships
Katie Fulton, Senior Strategist – Tuesday 1:00pm

Did you know that only 7 percent of clients feel their web development firm is doing a good job?
This is a problem. I’ll be talking about how we fix it.

It starts with setting expectations, sharing what you know, and creative problem solving.

I’ll share the hard lessons I’ve learned from years of managing some of Brick Factory’s biggest accounts.

There will also be Gifs. (I spent a lot of time researching Gifs.)