Sunday, 30th August 2015Drupalaton 2015 - the memories

"The advantages of variables in Drupal 7 is they're all loaded into memory. The disadvantages of variables in Drupal 7 is they're all loaded into memory".

With this, Károly Négyesi ('chx'), opened his Storing Data with Drupal 8 workshop at Drupalaton to a standing room only crowd - half whom chuckled knowingly, with the rest following shortly after once they'd had a little time to think about this technical juxtaposition.

It is this pull no punches attitude which made chx's workshop, for me at least, the highlight of the event - I like to know what is wrong, why it is wrong, and what we can or are doing to fix it. It was different when I'd asked the Hungarian, now living in Vancouver, to keynote our local DrupalCamp Brighton held back in January. In a departure from his normal techie talks, chx delivered a highly enjoyable and enlightening session talking about the profession of programming and how computer game music was the best type of music to listen to when coding. Here at Drupalaton though, we were back to the nitty and gritty of Drupal's internals.

Chx proceeded to give an excellent overview of the different subsystems of Drupal and how they'd changed from version 7 to 8. Drupal 8 brings together a lot of pieces which were fragmented in Drupal 7 - for example Drupal's Entity API where most of the functionality existed in a contributed module. By bringing it all together into core Drupal and providing APIs it improves maintainability through common knowledge, translation, access, performance and testing. He went on to cover the improved data stores in Drupal 8, for example the state API to store information such as when maintenance updates were last run using cron, a private tempstore for functionality like autosave data and the new quick edit functionality, and a shared tempstore for things like views.

After an intense hour and a half and a short break chx for a moment thought he'd lost half the audience but most soon filtered back in once their brains had a little more time for the coffee to take effect! The workshop continued with much information about how to use these new APIs, and how all configuration was now in YAML files then loaded into the database at runtime. In previous versions of Drupal, many settings were stored in the database and work-arounds such as using the Features module were used to extract settings. These approaches had varying results - as someone coming from an Enteprise Java world where storing settings in files is the norm I for one am very excited about this as it provides far more easier development, deployment and versioning. Features still exist in Drupal 8, but for their original purpose - to create exportable features of functionality.

Contributing to Drupal can be tiring!

After the workshop I made my way to the only air-conditioned room for what felt like miles around and managed to catch this picture of chx resting - with lots of talk recently about 'Headless Drupal' I thought the angle was quite funny.

I'd gone there to do some more work on Drupal 8 Rules - the fifth most popular module for Drupal which enables people to create functionality through the user interface, for example to send an email when someone adds a comment, or to apply a certain tax rate for a certain product in a certain country.

Although I'd previously worked on a few core issues for Drupal 8 like splitting up the 'password strength' and 'password matches' code and cleaning up some unused variables, I'd not really found an area I could focus on, but then I attended Drupalaton last year where there was a whole day of Rules, with a morning workshop bringing people up to speed on Rules in Drupal 8 and an afternoon spent focusing on how you could get involved and contribute.

For me, the workshop format is what makes Drupalaton so special - most other DrupalCamps have half-to-an-hour long sessions where you get an overview of something but don't really get time to delve in deep. I wanted to learn Drupal 8, and helping Rules out where I could to me seemed like a pretty good way of learning it. Since then I've helped update a few Rules Actions, Conditions, and Events to Drupal 8 and although I haven't done half as much as I've wanted to, it feels great to be learning lots and hopefully helping progress things a little bit.

Cruise Party

After spending the afternoon learning more about exporting, importing, and deploying configuration management in Fabian Bircher's workshop (slides and a great blog post from Fabian here), it was time for the yearly Drupalaton Cruise Party.

The cruise party is an excellent chance to chill out, see a little more of Central Europe's largest lake, talk Drupal, and enjoy a most wonderful sunset!

Behold Behat!

The next morning, after I'd managed to complete 30 lengths of the swimming pool and a 20km cycle for the second day in a row (yes, I know, shocker, but the Sun makes me a different person than I am in the dreary rainy grey UK!) it was workshop time again - this morning's being 'From User Story to Behat Test' with Pieter Frenssen.

I'm almost as excited about using Behat as I am about Drupal 8 - after many years of discussions about how functionality X worked, or whether feature X and function Y was included in the original quote, this way of defining requirements provides an excellent interface all project stakeholders can be a part of, with a solid technical backing enabling tests to be performed against sets of Plain English user stories.

The workshop was to go through setting up Behat with Drupal 8 which was great as I'd spent some time recently getting it set up but lacked in-depth understanding of the setup which Pieter's workshop helped enormously with so now I'll be using it on all my projects. There's plenty of info online about Behat so I won't go into more details here.

Grill Party

The afternoon was spent discussing using Drupal as a prototyping tool with Kristof Van Tomme László Csécsy and finding out about Pretotyping. This is of particular interest to me as I continue my work on abilit.es - a topic for another blog I think!

In the evening the lovely Drupalaton organising team arranged a Grill Party - this didn't happen last year but was great as was right next to the hotel and means we weren't dispersed across many different places.

As well as great food a few people had been working on some lyrics and provided lots of entertainment with a fab Drupalaton song!

So long Drupalaton, till next year!

Sunday was fairly quiet, no sessions were on but the sprint room was open so I interspersed some rules work with some cycling. After a few days of the hotel's all-inclusive menu I wasn't expecting to lose any weight, but certainly enjoyed getting the metabolism up and running again nicely!

In 36 degrees cycling was not easy but certainly fun and I'm glad I took my Brompton on its first trip abroad - I'd been wanting an opportunity to test out the Vincita Sightseer bag and it did not disappoint. I look forward to taking my bike to more places around the world - you definitely get to see a lot more of a place than just by foot and with the bag going into normal hold it doesn't cost any extra than normal baggage.

Monday finally came round and it was time to make the journey back to the UK via Budapest. The train to Budapest is always an experience - it stops *everywhere* and takes three hours to go just over a hundred miles, has no air conditioning, and wouldn't let me on without buying a 'boading pass' even though I had a ticket already. Luckily it was not much and I had a small amount of local currency to cover it otherwise I would've been stuck!

Felt great to cycle out of the hotel down to the train station the pack the bike up in its own bag (it fits on the back rack when riding) and I can't wait till I can do it all again, perhaps DrupalCon Barcelona, although I'm not a huge fan of cycling in cities & DrupalCon is quite intense so perhaps not, we'll see!

A big thank you to all those who had something to do with this lovely event, from organising to speaking, sponsoring, and of course attending, am already looking forward to next year's holiday, erm - I mean, Drupalaton!
tags: DrupalatonDrupal 8Drupal PlanetPlanet Drupal