Trip Report: SANDcamp 2017

Drupal at the Beach.
(The Very Windy Beach)

Every year in February, Drupalers from across the country travel to San Diego to get away from the harsh winter and enjoy the perfect 72 degree California weather. Attendees visit Pacific Beach, walk down the boardwalk, and sometimes even go sailing.

Former Web Chefs Matt Grill and Dustin Younse sail through Mission Bay after a weekend at SANDCamp 2016.

This year, however, attendees were met with … a little weather.

San Diegans, like myself, always find weather surprising and novel to the point where any time it rains for more than 10 minutes, we describe it as “really coming down”. But this time it really was pouring. 75 mph gusts of wind, cloudy skies, and a strong atmospheric river causing record rainfall. Drupal was not at the beach this year.

SANDCamp 2017: A little weather.Drupal Near the Beach

Falling in mid-February every year, SANDCamp affords many speakers the opportunity to field test trainings and sessions before they’re given at DrupalCon.

Drupal 8 with React.js and Waterwheel.js

With the help of my fellow Web Chefs, I presented the first iteration of my training API First Drupal 8 with React.js and Waterwheel.js which I’m happy to announce will also be given at Drupalcon Baltimore! In the training, we took the canonical JavaScript application, a todo list built with React, and hooked it up to Drupal 8 through a new JavaScript library called Waterwheel.js. Todos were stored in a headless Drupal site via the JSON API module and we even provided a login page, and a like button for todos. Overall, the feedback on the training was excellent. People enjoyed learning how to turn Drupal 8 into a world class content API while also getting their feet wet with a frontend JavaScript framework like React. I’m looking forward to improving the training and giving it at Drupalcon Baltimore this year.

Every Project is a Story

One notable session was Dwayne McDaniel’s talk Every project is a story: Applying storytelling to your client interactions in which he explained how the patterns that form good stories, form good projects, budgets, and discoveries. Dwayne explored these story structures and how they can help translate clients’ and stakeholders’ dreams into real plans.

Kalastatic

The session that caught my interest the most was From Prototype to Drupal Site with Kalastatic. Through a case study, Crispin explained the benefits of component driven design and showed off an open-source framework Kalamuna built called Kalastatic. It’s a kss-node driven static site framework for building prototypes and living style guides that integrate with Drupal. It’s a tool very similar to Emulsify, Four Kitchens’ component-driven prototyping tool and Drupal 8 theme. It is great to see the Drupal community converge on component driven development as a solid pattern for building frontends.

Keynote Surprise!

Due to the inclement weather California was experiencing that week, the scheduled keynote speaker, Darin Andersens, had his flight cancelled and couldn’t be there. Luckily Todd, Four Kitchen’s CEO and Co-Founder, always has a keynote in his back pocket. He fired up his laptop and gave his talk on The Future of The CMS, pontificating on where the web is going and what CMSes like Drupal must do to stay relevant.

Thanks, SANDcamp!

Maybe I’ll see you at SANDcamp next year! Also, if you’ll be at DrupalCon Baltimore, sign up for my training API First Drupal 8 with React.js and Waterwheel.js, and check out the other Four Kitchens Web Chefs, too!

 

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