Albert Albala specializes in quality control automation for web projects using open source code. Hi is a board member of Terre des jeunes and Bioénergie Haïti, two non-profits whose goal is local empowerment through sustainable development, large-scale access to environmetal technologies, and reduction of greenhouse gases through methane gas management. He write on his blog, Dcycle. He lives in Montreal with his family.
2017-: field operations manager, Terre des jeunes transnational
In this role, his task is to supervise, with Terre des jeunes's partner Biothermica, the management of field operations of Bioénergie Haïti and the Bioénergie Togo committee; set up a verifiable multi-currency accounting system; provide remote support and capacity building for accountants and general managers of field operations.
2012-: board member, Bioénergie Haïti
Bioénergie Haïti (bioenergiehaiti.org) was founded in 2012 by Biothermica Technologies Inc (Canada), Terre des jeunes transnational (Canada) and terre des jeunes Gonaïves (Haïti). Bioénergie Haïti (BEH) is a technological nonprofit which is active in the Artibonite region of Haïti. Its goal is to gradually ramp up waste collection, management, and monetization through energy production and methane gas destruction, thus contributing to sustainable development and climate change attenuation. See facebook.com/groups/bioenergiehaiti
1999-: Terre des jeunes board member
Terre des jeunes (terredesjeunes.org) is network for volunteer-based community groups active in sustainable development and democratic access to clean technology, and a founding member of Bioénergie Haïti. See facebook.com/groups/terredesjeunes.
2016-: Dcycle
Dcycle was launched with the aim of helping Drupal development teams transition toward best practices including automated testing and continuous integration.
2015-2016: The Linux Foundation
He was brought on to the Linux Foundation based in San Francisco to introduce automated testing, continuous integration and automated deployments for various high-traffic Linux Foundation properties including events.linuxfoundation.org, training.linuxfoundation.org.
2014: CGI
He was a senior Drupal developer at CGI and helped build automated tests and set up a continous integration and automated deployment platform based on Jenkins for the Drupal team at CGI, and worked on the 24 heures Tremblant website. In addition, he helped the Drupal team at CGI transition to Agile with two-week sprints.
2013: STM.info
In 2013 at tp1 he was a lead Drupal developer on the STM.info website, winner in 2014 of the "Acquia Partner Site of the Year - Transit Category" announced at DrupalCon Austin.
2006-2012
He started out with Drupal and other open source technologies as a consultant and partner-founder of Mediatribe, and as a Drupal developer at Koumbit, the first Drupal shop in Canada, where he helped standardize development procedures.
Talks, papers, contributions
In addition to maintaining several Drupal and Github projects, he is the author of the chapter "Automated testing with Simpletest" in the Definitive guide to Drupal 7 (Apress). He is a regular speaker in Drupal and Agile-related events, among them:
- At EvolveDrupal Ottawa 2023: A Single Dashboard to Monitor the Health of Dozens of Drupal Sites in Real Time.
- At EvolveDrupal Montréal 2023: Smoothing your migration by moving from a monolith to microservices.
- At Drupalcamp Montreal 2017: Let's unit test your code.
- At Bay Area Drupal Camp 2016 (Berkeley): Modifying legacy code the right way (hint: do not add if statements).
- At Drupal North 2016 (Montreal): Modifying legacy code the right way (hint: do not add if statements).
- At Drupalcamp 2015 (Montreal): Adios MAMP, so long Virtual Machines: fast and furious development and deployment with Docker, a talk on how continuous integration can be facilitated with Docker.
- At Drupal North 2015 (Toronto): Une introduction à Docker, a talk about how to develop, test, deploy and manage data using Docker.
- At AgileTour Montreal 2014: Les tests automatisés : huit tuyaux qui augmenteront vos chances de succès , a talk in French about the pitfalls to avoid with automated testing.
- At Drupalcamp Ottawa 2014: Automated testing for Drupal: 8 tips can make the difference between success and failure.
- At Drupalcamp Montreal 2013: co-presenter of a case study of the STM.info project (Albert is the guy in the blue shirt)
- Also at Drupalcamp Montreal from 2010 to 2013, various talks: "Automated testing with Simpletest", "Development-Stage-Production for Drupal", "Drupal continuous integration: a practical example"
- At Drupalcon Munich, co-presenter of Aegir business models
- At Drupalcon Chicago: Introduction to git lightning talk.
References available on request. Contact him on Twitter or LinkedIn