Joris Vercammen
I'd like to take you through my experience at what I believe was a successful Drupal Developer Days 2023. During this conference we addressed a total of about 125 issues in the contribution rooms, which is a solid number. By comparison, in Ghent last year we had ~140. I was able to work on about 4 issues myself, all around configuration schema validations. The numbers speak for themselves.
For me, the greatest value of this meeting lies in bringing the community together and meeting other contributors. It is for this reason that I spent a lot of time in the so-called contributor spaces. Debugging and researching complex problems together, and discussing them with other developers is not so easy at any other conference. Of course, we also attended a number of inspiring sessions. Most of these are also on youtube by now, I have already collected them within this article for those who want to watch them.
As a co-maintainer of Search API and some modules in the search ecosystem, I am always interested in what new modules are coming and what is in the near future.
So Artem and Christoph from the company 1x Internet had a good way to get me excited right away. They built a new module, which based on Search API and configuration very similar to Search API Pages a possibility to build endpoints based on the Search Data, which can then be used decoupled.Because they do not use entity loads by default, the performance of this is very high. In addition, they also use web components that also push perceived performance even higher.
Interesting to watch if you want to work towards a decoupled search
We had already met Kristiaan Van Den Eynde on the way to Vienna, so we had already gotten a small sneak peek of what the content of this session was going to be. We got an overview of some of the mistakes Kristiaan made when building the group module.
Some points that stood out for me:
Interesting to look at if you maintain or want to create your own module
Lauri Eskola is one of the product managers of Drupal Core, he highlighted some of the new features in 10.1 and 10.2, which do make it really clear that the future of Drupal looks very bright, and the velocity also remains stable.
Interesting for all drupal developers
I'm used to Gabor's talks that not only are they super clear, but they contain mostly facts. This talk deviates from that, giving a full history of initiatives as well as an opinion on how they work.
Interesting to watch if you want to work on an initiative yourself.
Cristina Chumillas is a senior frontend developer for lullabot, and has recently been given the opportunity to work on Drupal Core for 6 months. She has chosen to focus on the admin UI, we got a view on the status of the new designs and also what user research precedes and is coming to validate the designs also with real users.
Interesting for all drupal developers
The community is still looking for a location for the next dev days, but I hope to be able to get one in my schedule again next year.
