Custom Trainings

We can modify any of the above courses to best suit your needs! We are also capable of teaching about many other aspects of Drupal. Look here to get a better idea of our teaching experience and expertise and how we can craft custom trainings for you and your team.

Why Agaric

Clients and colleagues know Agaric developers for taking on the hard tasks when we collaborate on larger teams. We combine this expertise with the desire to raise people up. From our first projects fifteen years ago, our goal has been to make our clients need us as little as possible, to put as much power as possible in our client's hands. That is why we started using content management systems in the first place, and it is a tradition we uphold through developing with free/libre open source software, through writing documentation and blog posts, and above all through providing trainings.

Agaric is active in the Drupal community at-large and has presented at various Drupal Camps. We have also taken initiative in organizing Global Training Days in Nicaragua since 2013.

In preparation for Agaric's migration training at DrupalCon Seattle, we've seen again that getting a development environment suitable for working on Drupal 8 with Composer is a big road block. For that reason, here are instructions for getting it all going, suitable for our training or for working on Drupal in a code sprint, with only one hard requirement: PHP.

Getting a local development going is a problem for everyone, including programmers and people who should be skilled at this. Vagrant and DrupalVM were created to make identical development environments work on any computer. Unfortunately, that's more a pipe dream than a promise, as our own experiences and support requests we've received can attest,

Docker is another attempt to make local development match production environments, and a newer generation of Drupal-adjacent development workflow tools, such as DDEV, Lando, Docksal, and Humpback, build on it. Using an online development environment is also an option, but has too much reliance on working WiFi for conference situations.

The goal is any Drupal development environment—any of the above or anything else—where you can go to your project root directory in a terminal and type, say, composer update and have If you don't have a local development environment of any kind, here is the minimalist approach. All the steps start with opening your terminal.

Agaric, as a worker collective, does not have bosses and employees. We have skilled, hard-working teammates coming together to figure out and do ... everything.

We will make an exception to hire an excellent business director, project leader, attention-to-detail-and-the-big-picture person. If you happen to be a front end dev too, then great! If not, well, part of your role will be helping bring on more talent.

In addition to forging grand coalitions and leading amazing projects, we need help keeping track of invoices and payments and doing financial planning, managing people's skills and availability, and writing role descriptions way better than this one.

We want someone who expects within six months of joining us to have helped make things 300% more awesome. As a principal or a hired boss, part of this role will be making the decisions of what to prioritize, and saying no to potential projects that don't fit.

OK we'll just say it: We want someone to be Agaric's Liza Kindred.

Want to be part of something that's bigger than yourself, that works on projects and ideas bigger still?

Agaric's model is Free and Open: free and open standards, free and open work and management, free and open source code, free and open documentation. So be prepared to help us share everything we build, as a collective company and with code, to the Drupal community and beyond.

Agaric is not just about doing web work as a collective. We work on interesting, exciting projects (both client work for solid financial compensation and our own platform-building initiatives for dreams of riches). We then, also collectively, take some of the resources, skills, and connections we gain in this work to help build tools, networks, and open learning projects that change the world for the better. We see tremendous potential for a better world by helping people gain more control over their own lives, and open source free software is both a metaphor and a tool for how we can better lives.

We welcome serious and/or comical inquiries.

As big tech continues to violate our privacy, thwart worker power, collude with militaries and deportation agencies, we need to move to ethical tech tools we can trust.

However, it can be intimidating to make the switch to new, unfamiliar tools.

Micky is leading two workshops to help people make the switch.

“How to Switch to Free Software: Email” 4:45-6:45pm Wednesday, December 4

Micky Metts of Boston’s Agaric Tech Cooperative will help us get out of the fix. The key to regaining security and control of the internet is switching to free software equivalents to proprietary/corporate software for communicating – among many uses.

This first workshop focuses on communications using email and texting software. The moderate inconvenience of switching is worth the privacy of strong encryption and the freedom of a new world of user-controlled communications and organizing. This first workshop in Sala Quetzal focuses on email and texting with encrypted software under user control. Bring your phone.

“How to Switch to Free Software: Browsers Etc” 2-4pm Thursday, December 5

A professional software developer, Micky, will focus on this second workshop, also in Sala Quetzal, on browsing, searching, and virtual meeting software. She will show how free software opens up the world of “platform co-ops” – think of Uber under drivers’ control and AirBnB under homeowners’ control.

Micky will be assisted by at-the-elbow translator/helpers. Bring your laptop and your phone.