Katie
Drupalcon Barcelona
Last week I attended DrupalCon in the warm and beautiful city of Barcelona. I arrived to a parade running through closed streets with loud fireworks everywhere as it was the first day of the La Mercè Festival. On my first day I did some sightseeing, with Gaudi’s work being the highlight. La Sagrada Familia and La Pedrera are both amazing, La Sagrada Familia in particular is overwhelming and indescribable.
It was an eventful and exhausting few days catching up with old friends and making new ones, seeing as much of the city as I could, and of course attending as many sessions as possible. It’s never possible to attend all of the sessions that I’d like to, so I still have a few to catch up on. You can watch the keynotes and sessions on YouTube if you’re interested.
Day one kicked off with the keynote from Dries, he talked a lot about decoupling and how Drupal is ahead of other CMSes in this regard. He believes that progressive decoupling is the way to go and that rather than using the built in REST API, we should use the contrib module GraphQL. It's great to know that Drupal is heading in the same direction as us with our decoupled applications with AngularJS used as the front end. My highlight of the first day was Caring about quality as a team by Pedro Cambra and Rodrigo Aguilera. This is a topic we're fanatical about at Webscope, so it was great to hear how others are handling this, and I have a couple of new tools to test out and see if they're a fit for us and our workflow.
The keynote for day two was about the psychology of the web, by Nathalie Nahai, which I found interesting as it's a topic I've read quite a bit about. Once you know some of these tips and tricks, it's hard to not notice them in use everywhere, but the great thing is that they're generally about providing a better experience for everyone. The highlight of day two for me was the session on Architecting Drupal Businesses that are Built to Last by George DeMet from Palantir. There was a lot in this session that resonated with me, particularly the points around how the focus should be on the processes and outcomes, rather than trying to sell hours. If you've worked with us, you'll know we're very process orientated and have a focus on defining and delivering the MVP!
Day three started a bit differently, with the keynote delivered in two parts by members of the Drupal community - the first part was about mental health in open source and the second was about the phenomenon of contributing to a community and both were very well recevied, with standing ovations. The first session I attended on day three was an AMA (Ask Me Anything) with Project Managers and CXOs from established Drupal agencies, which was great as I always like hearing how companies larger than us handle things, and from this I have some ideas we can try out at Webscope, such as pitching projects internally and having the designers and developers decide themselves who will work on the project. However, my highlight of day three was on Visual Regression Testing by Amitai Burstein. We had recently started work on developing our own tool for automated visual regression testing and cross browser/device testing, so this was very timely as Amitai has developed a tool called Shoov. Shoov covers not only this, but handles live monitoring as well, so I'll definitely be trialling this to see if it's a good fit for us.
In the closing session, we found out that the conference will be held in Dublin next year, and that I travelled the longest distance to the conference!
This year, the overarching theme of the conference for me was the validation that we’re doing things right at Webscope, from both a technical perspective and business perspective. In fact, we seem to be at the forefront of embracing and implementing new ideas and technologies, even on a global level.
P.S. see if you can spot me amongst the 2000+ other attendees in the photo in the header of this post!