The last DrupalCon Europe just happened, the fourth Virtual DrupalCon, and possibly(?) the last one. Here is my take on this year’s DrupalCon Europe.
The week started early for me, Monday at 04:00 am, but that was a small sacrifice to pay for attending a conference with a 5 hours timezone difference from the comfort of my home. The chosen platform was Hopin, which worked pretty well with the limitations of a conference but enabling the participation and communication of the participants.
A two screens setup, the Drupal Slack page, Drupal.org documentation, development tools, Hopin Event, the Drupal Contributions website and many open browser tabs were the tools this time. I could say that gave a pretty close result as an in-person format at least in the learning experience. Social contact is still missing, but you know we still have to be careful of crowded places :).
There were many sessions in parallel that I missed and I would have liked to attend, but as always they are already available to be seen on Hopin and I hope soon on YouTube for free.
Here is a brief summary of my participation in the different sessions of the conference.
Monday
- PHP 8.1: what’s new and changed. Self-described.
- Creating Great User Experiences with Drupal – The Intersection of Development and Design: an interesting take of the design process of a project (visually and technically).
- Survival kit for CERN’s organic webscape: Kubernetes and a community of Makers. Interesting experience with a use case very familiar to me.
Tuesday
- Drupal and Ansible: a way of managing a 2000+ environment: An interesting history in how the infrastructure and deployment evolved during the years.
- Blackfire.io + platfform.sh. A great demo of integrated profiling.
- First Time Contributor’s Orientation: this wasn’t my first time contributing, but review all the available tools and information was very eye-opening.
Wednesday
- Driesnote: no description needed.
- Don’t waste your life supporting your team’s dev environments!: made me get interested in ddev and try it as an alternative to my local dev setup.
- Drupal Page Performance Workshop by amazee.io & Google: Performance measures and balloons :).
- The hierarchy of needs of high performing teams: inspiring talk in how clear team responsibilities are important and how to resolve conflicts during contingencies.
Thursday
- Keynote: Drupal Core Initiative Leads: we met initiative leads and their work in more detail.
- Closing session: a great summary of the week from the Drupal Association and a very active chat with the participants of the conference, Drupal landscape during next year, and how to keep the good things of a virtual conference in the future DrupalCons, maybe in an hybrid approach.
- Mentored Contrib: I participated in the mentored contrib and was great :).
Highlights
IMHO, these were the most interesting things from this DrupalCon:
- Virtual conferences are useful for many people and many of us think that should be kept as an option to allow more diverse participation.
- DrupalPod. As has been historically with my experience in Drupal, the community shows me a window of exciting new technologies to learn. Like Gitpod, DDEV and vscode in the browser.
- The Drupal Core initiatives have all great achievements.
- Is necessary to keep lowering the barriers to new Drupal contributors.
- The GitLab integration has made great achievements allowing a more “traditional” approach to contribute to the project.
- Drupal 8 is running out of time.
- The migration status to Drupal 9 of modules is pretty good.
- The new projects/migrations to Drupal 9 continue growing.
- We have to think about Drupal 10.
Conclusion
This was my third DrupalCon, and the experience was so different from the other previous two. I hope that some kind of virtual participation continues to be available in future conferences allowing some kind of involvement to people not able to travel. Thanks to all who made this possible.