Feedback from DrupalCon Amsterdam 2019

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Two weeks ago, from 28 to 31 October 2019 took place the DrupalCon Europe 2019 in Amsterdam.

Last year, Drupal Europe was organised by the community, this year it was KUONI Congress that was in charge of the organisation.

The venue was the RAI Amsterdam conference centre, where several conventions can be held in parallel in different sections of the centre. The architecture of the centre made it very easy to find your way around between the session rooms, the contribution rooms, the sponsors' area and the auditorium.

The venue was the RAI Amsterdam Conference Centre, where several conventions can be held in parallel in different sections of the centre.

The only downside was the size of the session rooms. The rooms were relatively small, with a capacity of between around 70 and 150 people for the larger ones, and they were packed. So it was impossible to attend certain sessions, which could have been a shame, fortunately there are replays on Youtube. On the bright side, it avoids having to face a half-empty room during presentations, and in terms of communication, photos of full rooms are always good :).

I didn't see in my news feed or on the DrupalCon website the number of attendees, but I'd say we were as many or more than last year, around 1500 people.

Day 1

A day devoted to contributions and training workshops.

Contribution

Having obtained access to the Video Embed Damdy module on behalf of Smile the week before DrupalCon, I took some time to do a code review of the module, fix standard coding, standardise the layout of the module page and publish a new version.

I've had a bit of a look at the Meetup API change problem, which means that meetups can no longer be retrieved from the Drupal France association site, but to no avail.

BoF content deployment Amsterdam 2019

BoF content deployment Amsterdam 2019.

I then gave a BoF (Birds of a Feather) on deploying content with Drupal. I was delighted and very surprised to see the room full, I wasn't expecting that, so I recycled a presentation given internally at Smile so here's the (slightly edited) support below in the article.

The purpose of the BoFs format is to have a discussion and exchanges, but despite my attempts to question the audience, apart from specific solutions or based on the Content Synchronization module, the audience didn't dare speak. It's true that the layout of the room, as a session room and not in round-table format didn't really encourage discussion. So it turned into a presentation of the Entity Share module, which was probably more successful given the number of questions I got.

Back in the contribution room, I was able to continue my work, started well before DrupalCon, on 2 Views issues of the Drupal core, as well as another issue on a community module :

Most of my time at DrupalCon was spent on these 2 Views issues. I won't talk more about them for the other days of the event, but I have to admit that it was a mixed bag working on them :

  • motivating : to have the Views maintainer next to you (that's the point of events, to be able to talk directly to the maintainers of the modules you want to contribute to), whom I thank enormously for his advice, code reviews and help. It's by pushing to get to the end of the issues that we make progress,
  • frustrating : when you spend time upstream to have a patch with tests that pass and that despite that you have to rework the solution because otherwise further in the acceptance process the patch will be rejected because "it adds options in the Views interface which is already saturated so the Drupal UI maintainers will block the patch " (words translated and slightly distorted by my memories and my interpretation), but at the same time when you arrive at a better solution, it's a bad for a good,
  • pénible : de devoir écrire plein de tests, tests pour la nouvelle fonctionnalité ou la correction du bug, tests pour le chemin de mise à jour, etc. mais c'est un mal pour un bien, au moins on est certain du résultat.

And at the end of the 4 days of DrupalCon, I had the 2 outcomes with patches that were much more complete and with all the tests that passed. i would have liked them to have been merged during DrupalCon, but too bad. Between DrupalCon and writing the article, Lendude gave me some feedback to take into account, so the work continues.

As suggested for the https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2888320 issue, this could be handled in a small community module, but the aim is to fix or bring features into the core so that all sites can benefit.

Day 2

Driesnote

As he does at every DrupalCon, Dries gives a presentation and an update on Drupal.

Note that this year there was no " prenote " where members of the community give a humorous presentation.

Here's my summary/notes, the presentation support and Youtube recording will of course be more detailed.

" Media is better than ever " : with now the module bringing the media library into the core and the ability to embed media in rich text areas.

" Drupal has never looked better " : focus on the new administration theme " Claro " which emphasises an improvement in accessibility.

The initiative to allow Drupal to be updated automatically has made great progress, many thanks to the European Commission for sponsoring this initiative. I knew that the European Commission employs members of the community from seeing the current company on user profiles, but I had no idea that it sponsored initiatives to this extent.

The JSON:API has seen its performance greatly improved and is getting an ecosystem of modules to automatically generate documentation on the site where it's used, as well as a module providing an interface to explore JSON:API endpoints, a module I'm going to test as it looks very promising for the Entity Share module.

Demonstration of a Drupal 8 -> Drupal 9  upgrade:

  1. Use of the Upgrade Status module to check the status of modules.
  2. Making updates to community modules
  3. Make updates to specific modules
  4. Update the core to Drupal 9

Presentations of the objectives for Drupal 9:

  • Always reduce the cost and effort of using and maintaining Drupal.
  • Prioritise the experience of beginners because studies between different CMSs show that Drupal is appreciated by experts but not by beginners.
  • New default theme : Olivero.
  • Be an engine for the open web : 1/40 of sites are on Drupal
  • Be the best tool for structuring data
  • Increase the number of contributors and companies sponsoring Drupal

Dream Migrations and Imports: Feeds UI + Migrate Engine

Presentation of the Feeds Migrate module, which will be the future version of the Feeds module that is becoming deprecated.

Based on the Migrate module in the kernel, and providing an interface for setting migration parameters, this avoids reinventing the wheel by allowing the same data processing plugins to be used in Feeds as those developed for Migrate.

There was a demonstration of the interface.

LIVE DEMO: Using GatsbyJS to build a decoupled (Drupal) website

Demonstration of GatsbyJS, much more than a static site generator.

This should perhaps have been a 2 or 4 hour workshop because the subject was introduced from the ground up, which is fine, but as a result, 3 quarters of the presentation had no connection with Drupal, so it was hard to see the point and how it's actually used on a Drupal project. It was only at the end that the link with Drupal via GraphQL or JSON:API was made.

Local community representatives meeting

Invited by Floris Moriceau, secretary of the Drupal France association, I was able to attend a meeting between representatives of Drupal associations from various countries and representatives of the Drupal world association to discuss the problems encountered by local associations, see what the world association could do and define the objectives of local associations.

It was interesting to learn that the problems encountered in France are quite similar with other local associations.

Day 3

How to utilize Open Source tools to create CI/CD & DevOps workflows without the vendor lock-in

Very dense presentation, as the subject is vast and the allotted time was only 20 minutes.

An enumeration of tools, scripts and tips on how to use Kubernetes in the simplest possible way, avoiding human error and independent of Gitlab, Jenkins and other CI/CD tools that have integrations with Kubernetes already ready but don't necessarily correspond to the use you want to make of them.

One of the final ideas is to put all the tools in a Docker container.

See the https://github.com/aroq/uniconf repository, which contains the tools in question to make it easier to create configuration files for Kubernetes.

Caching in Drupal 8 has evolved: Tips on how to improve your code

Unable to get into the room so see the recording.

Day 4

Day dedicated to contribution, in addition to the Views issues detailed above, I took up 2 issues I had created during the DrupalDevDays 2019 :

The aim being to add a rule of good practice to the machine names of https://www.drupal.org/project/coder/issues/3061184 blocks, but before this is merged into Coder, the Drupal core must be compliant with this new rule.

Tweet : https://twitter.com/mika2na/status/1189867494518984704?s=20

Conclusion

As announced in a previous post, I greatly reduced the number of sessions I attended in order to focus on the contribution.

A very good event. A pleasure every time to catch up with and meet new people from the Drupal community.

This year, 10 of us from Smile went to DrupalCon, which allowed me to get to know some people better whom I'd never met physically and to introduce members of the community to those for whom it was the first DrupalCon.

I was very pleasantly surprised to have so many people at my BoF on content deployment, so I think for the next DrupalCon or DrupalDevDays, I'll submit a session presenting Entity Share.

The location of the next DrupalCon Europe has not been announced.

Thanks to the organisers, sponsors, attendees and Smile for sending me there.

Videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpeDXSh4nHjSZET8xL2RyK3_2WeXxyWkY

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