DrupalCon Barcelona - Day 1 Overview

PreNote & KeyNote

We didn’t make it to the PreNote as it was crazy early for the laid back city to accept, but the KeyNote Dries gave was very honest about Drupal’s current obstacles.

“We should talk about that”

Was the mantra for the issues the community will face in the upcoming Drupal 8 adoption and subsequent migrations. It’s refreshing to have such critical reflection on our own projects. We shouldn’t pat ourselves for our successes but instead focus on where we need to improve.

Catch the KeyNote slides here:  http://acquia.slides.com/drupalcon/driesnote2015/fullscreen#/

Sessions

Our team hit up the coffee stands and then got straight into the sessions.

The variety of DrupalCon sessions is such that every level of experience can gain value. This also applies to varying disciplines - developers, managers and salespeople alike can all take something away.

Agile

Several sessions today focused on Agile development, planning and sales. This has become such a hotbed for delivering projects with greater success there is no surprise that it features largely here at DrupalCon.

Scrum is the big methodology discussed. Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) is the standard when starting off or talking to “classical” clients. Introduce those clients to Agile slowly and build on it.

Also discussed was RFPs and how to get new business when selling an alternative to the classical approach. The main answer is to explain the major pitfalls of Waterfall (inevitable changes, change requests and added costs, project delivery is disappointing eyc), then counter with how Agile aims to solve each of these. You may not be able to submit proposals to very strict RFPs, but those clients that agree to an initial, paid “deep dive investigation” will allow to sort those clients that you will enjoy working with from those you may not.

Drupal & CDNs

Drupal 8 can do some pretty interesting things with media handling and page loading using cache tags and cloudflare.

I’ll let the video walkthrough speak for itself (note: this is from an advanced session):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAcChiYo0q8&feature=youtu.be

Drupal 8

Drupal 8 is mentioned literally at every session. If you are new to Drupal 8, we recommend a session ”Altering, Extending, and Enhancing Drupal 8” as an architectural overview of the system for developers. After watching a session video you will have a good understanding of plugins, services, events and hooks in Drupal 8. Next, you can check out more specific sessions for any taste from Dependency Injection to Rules to Twig.

Drupal in 2020

Once again, Larry Garfield shares his vision on Drupal future. His session “Drupal in 2020” was a very natural extension of the morning keynote. He makes it clear that Drupal 8 is not a trend at all in comparison with such modern technologies as React PHP, HHVM or icicle.io. We should always be aware of new technologies and it seems that everyone in the room was impressed and motivated to push Drupal (9?) towards 2020.