My experience at DrupalCon LA 2015 - Part 2

This week, I had the privilege of attending some amazing sessions, and I’m excited to share the most memorable moments with you. By Friday, only 22 critical issues remained in Drupal 8’s development, with six issues resolved just this week—an impressive feat that showcases Drupal’s rapid evolution.

Over these three days, I attended numerous showcases, presentations on upcoming features for Drupal 8, and dedicated sessions on contributing to Drupal’s development. Here’s a day-by-day recap of some key sessions and learnings.

Wednesday Highlights: Open Source and Headless Drupal

On Wednesday, I attended sessions on various topics, including:

• Open Source Projects’ Sprint Development
• Internationalization
• Headless Drupal Application Showcase for Social Good
• Drupal 8 Plugin Creation

The “Sprint Development” session stood out to me. It provided insights into the requirements for open-source contributions and the role of sprint planning in projects like Drupal. I learned how the sprint approach fuels Drupal’s growth and how other open-source projects can adopt this method.

Another intriguing session was the showcase of a headless Drupal application developed by Manatí in Costa Rica. This application uses Drupal as a headless backend, AngularJS for the frontend, and performs exceptionally well on mobile devices. Impressively, it’s also used to combat the illegal transportation of goods across Costa Rica by providing a scalable API for government entities. This session demonstrated the powerful combination of Drupal and AngularJS, especially in low-bandwidth environments.

Thursday Highlights: Q&A with Dries and Drupal Core Leaders

One of Thursday’s key sessions was the Q&A with Drupal founder Dries Buytaert and other prominent members:

• Dries Buytaert (Founder)
• Jess (Drupal 8 Release Manager)
• Alex Pott (Configuration Management Initiative)
• Angela “Angie” Byron (Drupal 7 Release Manager)

In this session, Jess shared that just six months ago, 130 critical issues were open in Drupal 8 core, but only 22 remain—each of which must be resolved before the release candidate is ready. Here are some notable questions and responses:

• Drupal 8 vs. Other CMS Options: Dries highlighted Drupal 8’s major improvements, such as its Object-Oriented Programming foundation, Symfony integration, and enhanced configuration management. Angie added that Drupal 8 will offer greater security, fixing critical issues from earlier versions while remaining true to its open-source principles.
• Custom Issue Tracking vs. GitHub: Dries explained Drupal’s preference for a custom tracking system, designed specifically for contributors’ needs.
• Using Symfony Components in Drupal: Angie addressed this question by explaining that while Symfony is developer-centric, Drupal serves both developers and site builders. This requires Drupal to modify some Symfony tools to meet its dual-purpose objectives.

Friday of Sprints: Contributing to Drupal 8

Friday was dedicated to “sprints,” where contributors joined forces to solve various issues. In the morning, I participated in mentored sprints and tackled a Drupal 8 core issue, guided by mentors. This wasn’t about solving a major issue but rather learning team dynamics within a Drupal development environment. My team managed to upload a patch, which is now pending testing, and we learned how to review tickets and run Drupal unit tests.

In the afternoon, I joined another group to investigate a persistent issue. We learned that long-standing issues can sometimes become unfixable due to newer patches unintentionally resolving them. Despite this, I gained valuable insight into the complexities of issue resolution in an open-source project.

Other sprint teams worked on modules like:

• Organic Groups Forum
• COD (Conference Organizing Distribution)
• Migrate Module for Core
• Front-End United
• Panopoly
• Entity API for Drupal 8
• Drush/Drupal Console

This week was an incredible learning experience, giving me a fresh perspective on Drupal 8’s development and the power of open-source collaboration. Drupal 8, with its modular and multi-functional capabilities combined with Symfony’s robustness, promises to be a game-changer. Companies like Amazee are already implementing Drupal 8, as Dries mentioned in his keynote.

Thank you for reading, and feel free to leave any comments or questions below!

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