Remote DrupalCon - Day 2
Wednesday, 23rd September 2015Remote DrupalCon - Day 2
Let's never do that again
Unlike when I was watching yesterday's Driesnote, I actually quite expected these sorts of words to come out of the mouth of Larry Garfield, aka @crell, long-time Drupal contributor and the reason I stayed up way too late last night after blogging so not strictly Day 2 but deserves a mention as was a superb, insightful session "Drupal in 2020".
The never do that again refers to the four-or-so years spent on developing Drupal 8 with most of that time spent not developing new stuff but just barely catching up with modern technology trends. In order to be relevant even with today's technologies we need to be looking at what we could be doing and Larry shows off a number of impressive development projects which enable PHP to run in a similar way to node.js - even faster in many cases. Well worth a watch!
I ended the night with Ken Rickard's 2020 Vision, an entertaining session from a highly experienced professional reminding us that we are implementing a content management system, not a web publishing tool which comes from the print era, and thus there are many different considerations, and often many of the non-technical ones are overlooked whereas they can prove to be the biggest obstacles.
Day 2 Keynote - Web Psychologist Nathalie Nahai
I'd seen Nathalie talk before so I must admit I wasn't paying much attention until I saw a question pop up on twitter asking how this session mostly on marketing manipulation techniques was relevant to our community. Nathalie quickly focused on how we could use some of the techniques to help our current community as well as attract new people in by simply telling our story. A well-deserved round of applause came when Nathalie remarked:
"This is such a vibrant community it needs to be expressed online much more"
This is a big area of interest to me as I see so many wonderful stories from around the Drupal world yet currently the loudest voices being heard are the ones with funding. I've not an issue with that per se, I believe we could do more by collaborating together on strong marketing messaging.
I know the DA are doing as much as they can with the resources they have available, however I believe there is a place in the market for an organisation which markets the community as a whole - I envisage trucks that turn into training rooms / 24h coder lounges with schwag stores on board so can rock up to camps all over the place ;) But I guess that's another blog for another time - all I know is I'd love to go round the world interviewing the community for all to see & potentially training many more unexplored areas up in our community values of ownership!
Making the Leap: Successful Products as a Web Agency
Drawing from his own experience with Drupal offsite backup service NodeSquirrel, Drew Gorton from managed hosting service providers Pantheon gave an interesting talk covering how quite a few product businesses had managed to make the uncommon successful birth from an agency. Drew provides useful insights I empathise with as I much prefer working in the product world however what with my bootstrapping and co-operative ideals it's taking a little longer than I'd hoped for ;)
Self-Managing Organizations: Teal is the new Orange
This was a really interesting session from a company I hadn't heard of before - Liip. Their organisation is around the 120 people mark and they have a self-organising way of working, with the ratio of pay difference between high and low 3-1. I beleive the company is also owned by the staff however I don't think the percentages were detailed, will have to watch again. They said they had no plans and let teams decide their own projects, strategies, etc. Obviously it's not all plain-sailing and provided a for a great case-study in things going certainly a better way in terms of fairer working environments and enabling human beings to grow rather than be stunted by job roles.
I watched a little of Shut up and take my money! which was about integrating the Stripe payment system with Drupal 8. I've done this previously and nothing much seemed to be different on the Stripe side so moved on - the videos are pouring in quick & fast!
I then watched Expose Drupal with RESTful for a short while until I realised it was 7 so moved on to PhpStorm for Drupal Development which was a fairly short session clocking in at 15 minutes however very useful, even pointing out a feature which shows you what features you have and haven't been using. I'm no fan of the licensing on PhpStorm but it does make life much easier so will be harder to give up than my macbook but I guess will have to be done at some point if I'm going to achieve complete Freedom!
Headless D8 in HHVM plus Angular.js
It was noted from the outset that this was a sponsored session from platform.sh so they would be showing off their product, which I've had the pleasure of playing around with a little on a time-limited trial, however I was suckered in by the buzzwords so I stuck it out. Being at home it was even easier for me to just click the mouse than suffer potential slight embarrasment as I walk out of the session room but in reality that rarely happens and I end up sitting right through the session continually questioning myself as if I were watching the fifth instalment of Jaws wondering wether an incident with a fish will happen at some point.
Suffice to say platform.sh works with HHVM and Angular.js. I've nothing against sponsor talks or platform.sh, I think they are both good things, just not this session, for me at least. I guess I wanted to see something shiny, not just a product demo, I feel they could've made a lot more out of the title than they did without having to be so focused on the continual sales pitch. Which I know that's what it was, but felt more like something that should've been out in the exhibit hall. I guess that doesn't get videod and put into the stream though.
I started to watch Altering, Extending, and Enhancing Drupal 8 by Joe Shindelar (@eojthebrave) whom I've had the pleasure of meeting at a number of Drupal events here & in the US. Joe's a great teacher, but for me as I've been playing with Drupal 8 for a while now I decided to skip on, especially when he said "Don't hack core" which is I know the thing, but in Drupal 8 I plan to hack core by simply using its interfaces... it's made for 'hacking' this time. Properly hacking that is of course! I realise this presentation wasn't for me though.
Then I watched a little Building amazing searches with Search API but all was looking pretty similar to 7 so thought I'd put that one on the watch when I have a specific need for it list. Then came along a truly awesome session...
Avoiding and surviving of contribution burnout
As someone who has suffered from depression I am particularly proud of the fact our community can have sessions that cover topics like this. I feel like I'm coming from a different angle as I'm spending most of my time working out how and where I can be of help and it's the client work if anything that's burning me out due to my complete lack of wanting to do anything other than write beautiful code, and I've not yet met a client who has the want or budget to pay me to do that. Sarcasm aside, burnout is a big issue, and something I have an issue with the business/community balance side as I believe one is currently gaining far more benefit out of the other than there should be and I don't really think it's anything that can't be solved with a more balance put back into the situation. That of course is not to make light of anyone's situation, just how I see the situation from my many travels around camps and to CXO meetups and my experience in the world up until now.
Pain Points of Contribution in the Drupal Community
Along similar veins to the previous session, Kalpana Goel delivers another important session trying to untangle the issues surrounding contibuting to the community and how we can potentially go about solving them.
Then I watched around half of Hassle-free Hosting and Testing with DevShop & Behat which looks like an interesting, open, option for self-hosting your own sites. Being a little tired I thought I'd come back to that when I'm more awake one weekend.
Last one for the day was The future of Groups on Drupal.org, which gave an interesting insight into forthcoming changes on drupal.org, much powered by the persona work done previously, so should be interesting when I log in and tailored content appears for me! It's great to see movement finally here, but I agree with Dries when he said previously it really needs perhaps ten million dollars of investment in it. ATEOTD, if you don't look after your tools you won't be able to make a decent product. It's always been my hope that as we talk about Drupal more, about the Why, and show people around the world what we're building the community will organically scale as people will want to be part of it. I think we have a number of issues in the way of that at the moment - perception, current human fear-driven non-sharing society, and state of internal systems. It's good to see a little focus going on the things we can fix now, hopefully we can scale it up soon so we don't get more fractured across different proprietary community silos just because they're 'easy'.
Wrap-up
Well I may not be in Barcelona but I'm certainly ranting like I'm at DrupalCon, just on the record lol! With all the tweets and session-watching I'm certainly getting DrupalCon tired so signing off for the night, looking forward to the final day of sessions tomorrow with another important keynote and of course looking forward to finding out where next year's European DrupalCon will be - hopefully I'll plan a little better and build a little buffer so I don't miss out!
Unfortunately my comments are broken on this site so whilst I'm migrating to Drupal 8, do please tweet me @stevepurkiss or get in touch via my contact form.