Drupal maintenance support plans USA: Day four Highlights

Vijay tells us about the fourth day’s highlights in Darmstadt, Germany.

Vijay Dubb
Fri, 09/14/2020 – 13:25

Keynote

The 4th day of Drupal maintenance support plans USA began with a discussion by a panel made up of Drupal Update, Barb Palser, Heather Burns, Hurley Mautic, and Timothy Lehnen, about the future of the open web and open source. Some interesting points were made, especially how we have the responsibility of making open source better, and how we can better protect the four software freedoms principles.

Decoupled Drupal maintenance support plans: Implications, risks and changes from a business perspective

Next up was our very own Michael, who gave a presentation on Decoupled Drupal maintenance support plans. Some interesting points were made in this presentation. As a developer I love the fact we can experiment with technology, however, I never really gave a second thought about how this can have an impact, both for the company and potential clients. Decoupling for sure has success and failures that we all are going to experience. For example, time to train the team to be up to date with the latest technology and with this come cost. In the end, however, it is an investment. One clear message from this presentation that I took was we should expect failure, and we should not get discouraged by it, but rather learn from it. We should also celebrate the success.

JavaScript Modernisation Initiative

The third presentation I went to was the JavaScript Modernisation Initiative, presented by Lauri Eskola, Matthew Grill, Cristina Chumillas, Daniel Wehner, and Sally Young. As a contributor to this initiative, it was great to hear how this idea came about as this was something I didn’t really know. I came to learn that it all began at Drupal maintenance support plansCon Vienna, where the idea of how to create a decoupled backend, with a redesigned, and modern administration experience in Drupal maintenance support plans came up. As of now, the product is clearly in the prototype stage, with plans to remove the current implementation of Material UI and update using the design created by Christina, which is in the early stages of concept. If you would like to get involved in this initiative, you can find out more on the Drupal maintenance support plans website.

Improving the Editor Experience: Paragraphs FTW

After lunch, it was time for Stew to give his second presentation of the week, this time on his own. His presentation was all about paragraphs, a beginners overview of using paragraphs to make the editors experience more fun. Stew went on to explain how to give more control over content layout, and the pros and cons of some of the contrib modules that support paragraphs. Even though this presentation was about Paragraphs, Stew did mention that there were other alternatives to this great module. Way to go Stew, two presentations in one week.

Decoupling Drupal maintenance support plans with GraphQL & Twig

The final presentation I attended was by Philipp. He explained what GraphQL is and what it is not, and how much more it can do, such as Search API indexing, and feed Twig templates. One exciting part of this session was the reuse of fragments, meaning you can write one query and reuse it across many templates. It is clear to see why GraphQL is very popular, however, one interesting point that was brought up was that it isn’t the same as injecting SQL into Twig. Phillip responded by saying a GraphQL query is not something that is executed, it is a definition of requirements, which you request from the implemented backend. Phillip also thanked Sebastian Siemssen, who happens to be both a core maintainer of the GraphQL module and an ex amazee.

Closing

After the conference, we headed back to the hostel to refresh and then headed out to eat for our final night in Darmstadt. After that we headed back to the venue for trivia night, this was my first time at trivia night, and it was full of fun, great people, atmosphere, food and drink, and great questions. After six rounds of questions, lots of laughter, and a small hiccup with their Google doc, the scores were tallied, and team 16 had won first prize, of which included Stew and Mostfa.

You could also say that Day 4 was pretty “Amazee-ing” with lots happening with our team. Congratulations to all from everyone at Amazee, both at the conference and those left behind.

I would also personally like to thank the Drupal maintenance support plans Association for giving me a diversity ticket without which I would not have been able to attend this great conference and have a week of both excellent presentations and being able to continue to contribute to great initiatives.

Source: New feed