I recently had the good fortune of being a part of Drupal Developer Days 2014 in Szeged  - my first Dev Days! It was a really amazing mix of experiences for me, from visiting Hungary for the first time to meeting lots of new people and, of course, lots of Drupal.

Szeged is a beautiful city in Southern Hungary that is no stranger to Drupal (the city hosted DrupalCon Europe 2008), and was a pleasure to visit. If you’re not familiar with Drupal Developer Days, it is an event focused on bringing the Drupal community together to work on the development of the Drupal project. The event presents a great opportunity for some of the leading Drupal experts and developers to work on, and learn about, Drupal 8 in depth before it’s widely released. Dev Days featured code sprints, workshops, sessions, BoFs, after parties and was overall a great time.

Since I’m not a quite Drupal 8 ninja (yet!), I was eager to find opportunities where I could help and learn at the same time. With this in mind, I decided to pick two sprints to add to my schedule: the Drupal.org sprint and the Search API migration sprint.  

Drupal.org Sprint

I knew Drupal user @tvn before the event and had some experience with Drupal.org stuff, so I figured this sprint would heat up to be llots of fun. We started with 89 open issues and 5-6 people in our team. Tasks ranged from “the tiny ones” (https://drupal.org/node/2046683) to “the big problems” (https://drupal.org/node/2130537). But is anything really a problem if you have @tvn, @jthorson, and @jessebeach around? These guys spent a week and closed nearly 50 issues! Yep, some of them are still in review or RBTC, but the majority are resolved. You can find more info here.

Search API Migration Sprint

If you’re familiar with Drupal, you probably know the ApacheSolr and Search API modules and their maintainers: @nick_vh and @drunken_monkey. I was lucky to have a chance to be here with them and merge these two monsters into one single pretty baby! The code is currently inside an external sandbox now (https://drupal.org/sandbox/daeron/2091893) but will be released as a new version of Search API module soon! It was here where I spent most of my days in Szeged, and was in the great company of some talented geeks: @mollux, @aspilicious, @Andrew_l, @Andre-B and others. Before Szeged Dev Days, SearchAPI 8.x was almost clean repo, but now you can already come and try the feature contrib search solution for Drupal 8. We have migrated almost all the code from 7.x version - most of it is already ported to new standards, and some of it has been covered with web and unit tests.

Szeged Drupal Dev Days was awesome, and a great opportunity to learn more about Drupal 8. I would definitely recommend attending any upcoming events like this. Where else can you meet such amazing teams, learn lots of new  stuff about Drupal 8, phpunit, symfony, etc. and feel the spirit of Open Source?

See you there!

Tags: DrupalDrupal Developer DaysDrupal eventsCheck this option to include this post in Planet Drupal aggregator: planetTopics: Community & Events