I organized Drupal 9 Porting Day for April 28 as part of my #DrupalCares funding sub-campaign to help the Drupal Association bounce back from their financial losses due to the ongoing pandemic. It was a lot of fun with Lee Rowlands, Vladimir Roudakov, Adam Bergstein and Mike Lutz helping lead the contribution before and after my time of availability. 126 issues were worked on and 43 newly Drupal 9 compatible releases were made then.

Given how fun it was, with Drupal 9 coming out next week it was logical to do another event. Last Friday would have been a great opportunity in person at DrupalCon Minneapolis if not for the pandemic (again). So I decided to schedule the event for that weekend. Surabhi Gokte and Gabriele Maira helped a lot in getting the event off the ground and we announced Drupal 9 Porting Weekend for May 22-23 to accommodate people available on the workday as well as the weekend.

With more time to prepare, a lot more interested folks signed up to help lead the event in their respective timezones. 14 leads signed up and helped contributors for 52 hours, while the event lasted. Thanks Vladimir Roudakov (VladimirAus), Janna Malikova (JannaKha), Vaibhav Jain (vaibhavjain), Tsegaselassie Tadesse (tsega), Gabriele Maira (gambry), João Ventura (jcnventura), Oleh Vehera (voleger), Matthew Radcliffe (mradcliffe), Michael Lutz (mikelutz), Adam Bergstein (nerdstein), Kristen Pol, Qiangjun Ran (jungle), Jaideep Singh Kandari (JayKandari) and Digant Jagtap (digantdj), you were fantastic!

Kristen Pol and Tsegaselassie Tadesse were also very active in the planning stage, Kristen published a very detailed guide to the weekend, Tsega wrote up and posted developer tips. The Bassam Ismail posted this video based on those guides of an actual Drupal 9 project update running with Upgrade Status and Rector, ending in submitting the patch:

So with everything well prepared, Vladimir and Janna started the weekend and the leads were handing off responsibilities to each other throughout the whole event. This is how time coverage looked like for the whole 52 hours. There was not a single time when someone was not there to help:

We had a lot of fun and learned a ton from each other. While numbers will not explain the event, that is all we have after the fact to look at, so here they are:

• 119 people participated on the #d9readiness Drupal slack channel throughout the event
• 521 issues were worked on altogether
• 188 of those issues are Fixed or Closed (fixed) at the time of this writing. That is more than the number of issues even worked on on the previous event!
• An additional 111 issues are Reviewed & tested by the community at the time of this writing, so hopefully many of those will also land soon

When looking at project releases, the weekend also supported a major increase in daily newly Drupal 9 compatible releases also with several days of after-effects (I am counting these with my own script):

New releases at the weekend and shortly after included fun modules like Pirate but also seriously cool modules like the Tome static site generator, Quicklink and top 200 most used modules like Views Accordion and Schema.org Metatag.

As luck would have it Drupal 9.0.0 RC1 was also released on this weekend, which meant that people testing their updated projects also gave the Drupal 9 release candidate a test drive right away.

For me this event was amazing to organize. The results in new Drupal 9 compatible projects before the stable core release and the additional testing of the release candidate are all good material outcomes. The raised awareness around the porting process and tools as well as the know-how shared will last even longer as people use what they learned and teach others as well. Also the concentrated increased use of the tools resulted in more improvement suggestions, so we can make them even better for the next wave of porters to come.

Thanks all for your involvement, you made a lasting difference. Keep spreading your know-how and all the good things about Drupal 9!

Ps. Next up is celebrating the release on June 3rd, 2020! Post your artwork, selfies, videos and events at https://celebratedrupal.org/ and let's have some fun together.