Last week I visited the city of Prague to attend the European DrupalCon 2022. The even was held between September 20th and 23rd, and was attended by over 1,200 people.
This was my first physical conference since DrupalCamp London 2020, and the first DrupalCon I have attended since DrupalCon Dublin 2016. Despite the worries about covid I was still pretty exited to attend the event. I arrived on Monday night and as the event didn't start properly until Tuesday afternoon it gave me a small chance to explore the city of Prague before the conference started.
There were so many talks, sessions, meetings, and events during DrupalCon that I could write for pages and pages about the conference. I am quite sure, however, that no one would actually read all of that I'll just post a couple of highlights from each day and provide a sum up at the end.
After the initial welcoming talk the conference started with an introduction to some of the initiatives that are being worked on at the moment, each one introduced by a member of the initiative team. The initiatives discussed where CKEditor 5, project browser, project update bot, GitLab integration, localize.drupal.org, distributions and recipes, and automatic updates.
If you look over this blog, or know me, you will see that I’ve now have reasonably significant experience as both a Salesforce and Drupal developer. The last couple weeks I have been thing about what from my Drupal experience supports my work as a Salesforce developer.
I think there are three parallels that are encouraged in Drupal developers that helped me learn to be a good Salesforce developer quickly.
Both Drupal and Salesforce run in constrained environments. Web applications, regardless of their purpose, have to protect themselves against bad actors and bad neighbors. There are execution timeouts and memory limits, for both platforms. Salesforce adds a variety of additional limits and governors, but they are all logical extensions about memory and time. Lots of other platforms allow developers to ignore resource use until they reach a crisis point. Don’t believe me, just check the memory used by Chrome, Electron Apps, or any other Chromium-based application.
Working in resource constrained environments forces you to think through how to use the resources you do have efficiently. While these platforms aren’t like working on hardware with highly limited resources, they still can test your resourcefulness.
Drupal and Salesforce both provide ways to run large jobs across many processing contexts. New developers on both platforms often only resort to using batch and queueable operations as a last resort, but learning to use those solutions is critical to success on most interesting projects. When you try to avoid them you create solutions that appear to work and fail at scale.
Coming to Salesforce from Drupal, I already knew and understood the importance of asynchronous batch processing. So when solutions needed batch processing it was second nature to learn that part of the platform.
For all Salesforce’s push and marketing to avoid code, Salesforce developers are often taught that once you write code you just do everything in your code. The interfaces you can use to extend the platform’s existing solutions are treated as advanced topics. But when you work with Drupal, you are encouraged from the start to create modules that build on and extend the platform’s existing strength. Drupal developers are encouraged to leverage the features and utilities all around them.
This has always been true, but even more after Drupal’s move to leverage Symphony plugins and services. As a developer used to extending the platform, I came to Salesforce looking for ways to extend the platform’s declarative tools.
Often Salesforce developers create powerful solutions built purely in code triggered by record changes or simple buttons. They look passed Apex Actions that extend the Flow declarative automatons, platform events, and other tools that extend the system. But when you embrace a platform’s basic structures you often create more flexible solutions than your could with pure code.
The mind set of extending a platform, which I brought with me from my Drupal work helps me create tools and solutions that are designed to adapt over time.
Event driven architectures are not new, but their popularity continues to grow. Where platforms used to follow informal patterns that equated to event systems, now we see formal event structures being build to replace old habits.
Drupal and Salesforce both have had event frameworks for a long time: Drupal had hooks (events by naming convention), Salesforce had triggers.
Both have seen major upgrades to their event patterns in recent versions. Platform events in Salesforce, still making their full power clear to a lot of developers. Symphony brought proper events to Drupal in version 8 and continue to help push the platform forward.
I have learned to leverage the events systems on both platforms. Understanding them as tightly constrained state machines, and learning to push them to their limits, helps me get the most from both platforms.
My experience with Drupal hooks and events has made it obvious to me when to leverage Salesforce’s Platform events. As Salesforce increases the number of places you can use them in their declarative tools, it increases the value of this approach.
As a developer, what you learn in one part of your career can make you stronger in the next. As a field we’re not actually that creative. Even if the details are different, the concepts will often carry forward because they are built on the same fundamentals. Whatever platform you are using today, learn how to make it sing – it’ll help you learn the next faster and better.
The post What I Brought from Drupal to Salesforce appeared first on Spinning Code.
This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from Dries Buytaert's blog.
Last week, over 1,200 Drupalists gathered in Prague for DrupalCon Europe. It was great to see everyone together in person.
In good tradition, I delivered my State of Drupal keynote. You can watch the video of my keynote or download my slides (380 MB).
Today the web is ingrained in every aspect of our daily lives. We use it for work, to socialize, to pay our bills, get healthcare, and gain access to information.
As more transactions, collaborations and interactions are taking place online, there is now a greater responsibility to ensure that the web is inclusive of every person, and accounts for everyone's safety.
When people are excluded from being able to access online experiences, they are also excluded from rewarding careers, independent lifestyles, and the social interactions and friendships that bring people together.
For those reasons, we need to do everything we can to protect and grow the Open Web.
In my keynote, I made the point that Drupal is an important player in the preservation and growth of the Open Web.
I kicked off my keynote talking about some of my personal reasons for using Drupal, most of which have to do with the future of the Open Web.
After all these years, I continue to upload my photos to my website, despite there being plenty of simpler alternatives (e.g. Facebook or Instagram). I do this for a number of reasons.
First, my photos are precious to me, and I don't want them to get lost. I look at news stories about MySpace and Facebook losing users' content. I like that I'm in control of my own data, including my backups.
Second, I don't like how proprietary platforms limit my creative freedom. Pages and templates within a closed platform tend to look the same. It's hard to stand out, or even just express yourself the way you want to. With Drupal, I'm unrestricted in how I share my photos.
Third, I don't like how these platforms treat my friends and family. Many of them use invasive tracking. For that reason, I don't use trackers or ads on my website. My site aspires to the privacy of a printed book.
All of these are reasons why I want both Drupal and the Open Web to win. We don't want to live in a world where proprietary platforms reign supreme. We need more "Good Software". Software that is open, flexible, secure, accessible, and pro-privacy.
Making security, privacy, accessibility, multilingual capabilities, usability, and ease of maintenance top priorities is hard work work, but it's worth it. Caring about Drupal is the same as caring about the Open Web.
The good news is that Drupal has grown into a powerful platform for ambitious site builders. Drupal empowers millions of ambitious site builders to create Open Web experiences.
However, we have to get better at promoting what we're good at to ensure more people understand how powerful and influential Drupal is. That influence becomes really clear when you look at Drupal's end users.
Because of Drupal's impact on the digital landscape, we keep a high bar with regards to stability, reliability, accessibility, security, backwards compatibility, and more. With great impact comes great responsibility.
This high bar can make contribution difficult and slow, and is sometimes what keeps people from contributing back more to Drupal.
Unfortunately, we can't lower the bar. However, we can make it easier to achieve our high bar. That's why we are moving from Drupal's homegrown collaboration tools to GitLab.
GitLab streamlines and automates various steps of the contribution process. Check out the Drupal.org GitLab video from the Drupal Association for an update.
Another way to accelerate innovation is to grow our capacity and attract more people to Drupal.
The best way to attract new people to our community is by making easy-to-use software that solves real world problems.
Since my previous DrupalCon keynote, I'm happy to report that we've made a lot of progress on our key initiatives. A few key highlights:
Each of these initiatives is significant because they make Drupal and the Open Web more approachable.
In addition, the Project Browser initiative and Automatic Updates initiative saw tremendous progress. Videos below.
To learn more about Drupal's strategic initiatives, you can watch the Drupal Core Initiative Leads keynote. Highly recommended for those that want to contribute.
Drupal 10 is scheduled to be released in mid-December. And after the Drupal 10 release, users will have 11 months to upgrade from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10. Drupal 10 will require PHP 8.1, something to plan for as well.
Luckily, the upgrade path has never been easier. In the video below, we compare the upgrade path from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 to the upgrade from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10. As you can see, the Drupal 9 to 10 upgrade is much more automated. It will be the easiest yet!
The update to Drupal 10 is required because some of Drupal 9's third-party dependencies will reach end-of-life. If you don't upgrade within 11 months, you will be running a site with unmaintained third-party dependencies.
I hope we can all find ways to care about building the web we want to see for the future. Making Drupal better means making the Open Web better.
I'd like to thank everyone that was involved in making DrupalCon Prague, Drupal 10, and the key initiatives described above a resounding success.
Last but not least, I'd like to encourage even more people to get involved. It might not always be easy, but it's well worth it.
We’re so excited to share about a program that we're working on inside of the Lullabot team – Healthy Minds @Work. This is a science-based app and program shown to help strengthen your well-being skills. The Healthy Minds program was built by neuroscientists and is designed to teach and measure skills associated with emotional well-being using meditation and other contemplative practices.
A group of 'Bots get together to discuss the program and the 30-Day Challenge that's been going on inside Lullabot.
The DrupalCon newbie trinity from OpenSenseLabs - Anmol Goel (Tech Lead), Pritish Kumar (Tech Lead), and Akshita Rawat (Marketing Lead) - attended DrupalCon Prague 2022 and were psyched with the community exposure. We were looking forward to getting to know the community better and meeting familiar faces who we had only heard or read about. This is a quick recap of our experience at DrupalCon Prague 2022.
I got introduced to the Drupal community in 2017. Ever since, I have been learning and writing about the new upgrades, modules, distributions, and the community.
From a non-tech perspective, I always wondered what DrupalCon could be like other than technical sessions and contributions.
When I got my session selected for DrupalCon Prague 2022, I was ready to know the answer.
Our team included Anmol Goel, Pritish Kumar, and myself. Anmol & Pritish were selected as volunteers for the event. It is an opportunity given to a handful of community members who have made significant contributions to the community. I was to speak on effective team management practices, also highlighting our employee-first policies at OpenSense Labs.
All three of us were looking forward to getting to know the community better and meeting familiar faces who we had only heard or read about (for sooo long).
The opening keynote majorly covered the new product updates and why they matter. With CKEditor 5 coming up in Drupal 10 - it was the highlight for me.
The keynote also covered new updates in The Local Inititative, Project Browser, & moving to Git for community contribution, among others.
DriesNote has always been a popular session in DrupalCon. When you sit for a Dries note, it is not just about learning the product growth plan, you experience how much the community looks inward to make it better for everyone.
This year’s Dries note focussed on 2 things:
It was interesting when he used his website as a use case to showcase how Drupal is a safer bet (keeping in mind user privacy, owning data, and accessibility) than most of the platforms (esp. social media platforms)
Important product updates included - Recipes, Project Browser, and moving to Git for collaboration (more about it later).
And then our Aha! moment.
We started our quest by hopping from one booth to another and interacting with everyone with who we could. I was amazed at the thought-process behind all the efforts they had put in for their booths, in terms of creativity.
As a Marketer, I was inspired by their ‘hook’ to bring in the audience and show them what they wanted to.
In the Pantheon booth, they were literally printing your t-shirts in front of you.
Dropsolid had Beat Saber in their booth. You could play it all the time and compete with fellow community members for the highest score.
Then Annertech booth, where their team was nice and patient enough to teach us how to juggle (very helpful if you are a Project Manager :P)
1Xinternet had a chill-out place in their booth with a photo competition. Guess who won the photo challenge competition on Day 3.
Factorial was serving really good coffee with a cute unicorn over their booth.
At SystemSeed booth, we met Bran who bought little handcrafted jam bottles he got exclusively for DrupalCon.
Not to forget the open mic, and jamming sessions going on throughout.
Anmol: It was a delightful and wholesome experience attending the conference. Since this was my first community event, I was nervous too. I volunteered as a session monitor for ‘Growing and sustaining an Open Source Drupal Distribution’.
The Q&A for this session went on for almost 30 mins. It was an extraordinary experience by being involved so closely in a session and seeing how the community engages within. This definitely inspired me to submit sessions for the next Con.
Being involved with sessions as a runner, and ensuring everything was in place and done right when the session happens brought a lot of respect for the organizing team. They made the first DrupalCon Europe post-pandemic happen without being located in the same place. Cheers to them!
Akshita: As a first-time DrupalCon Speaker, I was jittery and excited after all it was an opportunity I got after not being able to make it to 2 DrupalCons (was twice selected as a speaker before).
They say the third is a charm. It must be.
I got stage fright when preparing for my session since this was the first event I had attended after the pandemic. And the room was packed. But after hearing so many sessions in the first 2 days and meeting amazing people of Drupal, I was more comfortable when giving the session.
Post-session when someone from the audience reached out to tell me that they really liked my session and learned something from it - made the remaining Con even better :)
The last day of the event was focused on contribution. We worked with Leslie and the team on Project Browser. Project Browser helps new website owners to find modules of their interest from their own website. Here’s how it went.
Anmol: I was looking forward to contribution since I wanted to see how I could bring it back to India and introduce it to new team members. Working with the community on issues and resolving them in real time was an amazing experience. It felt good by doing my bit and giving back to the community.
Akshita: This was my first contribution. I wasn’t really sure what it would be like, since I was looking for a no-code contribution. Found Leslie who introduced me to Project Browser and I made my first non-code contribution by adding and reviewing couple of module descriptions for Project Browser. It was so easy and I will definitely contribute more moving forward.
Our team - Uzumaki 1 - won second prize in Trivia. We had 2 community members joining us - Deepak and Fernando Simoes. For one of the rounds where we answered all the questions correctly, we won a free drinks voucher too.
Meeting these amazing people who make the community and product what it is, genuinely made us feel that we are a part of it. Learnings from the amazing sessions and having non-Drupal conversations with them inspires you to get more involved with the community. In the end, I realized, even as a non-techie, I too can contribute in unique ways, in building the community, and making the product better.
The community I have been part of for so long finally has a face.
DrupalCon was tiring, no doubt at all, but it was an enthralling experience for all of us.
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It’s back! CTI meets Prague for DrupalCon 2022 - the world's second-largest annual gathering of Drupal experts and enthusiasts. For some, it was great to return to the perfect place to share expertise, create solutions and build relationships. For others, it was a first leap into an event which offers a fantastic opportunity to connect with members of the community whilst gaining knowledge from experts.