We love Drupal Camps for a lot of reasons, and the popular Camp in the Twin Cities is no different. We get to learn about new projects, see old friends, and discover interesting ideas and solutions to challenges in Web development, design, and strategy. In addition, not only does our Senior Web Designer Carl Martens live in the Twin Cities area, we’ve worked with a number of clients there, including the University of Minnesota and PRI, among others.

This year, we have six Palantiri in attendance, presenting sessions on a number of important topics like Drupal 8, testing, technical debt, design systems, and much more. The Camp also gives us a unique opportunity to talk shop with past, current, and potential clients to learn about their projects and understand the challenges our expertise can help solve for them. Heading to the Camp? Please do let us know via our contact form.

We give an overview of our sessions for Twin Cities, and propose why each is important for your project or those working on it. We’ll update this post once the recordings are online.

Rendering HTML With Drupal: Past, Present, and Future

by Steve Persch
Friday, June 26, 10:30am

What is it about?
This presentation will review the mental models used in Drupal theming and propose a workable path forward. For years, Drupal core has encouraged a mindset of altering and overriding its internal data structures. Developers in the Drupal 6 era created a philosophy called “sustainable theming” that relied heavily on CSS to work best with Core’s tendencies. The rapid acceleration in the wider Front-End community in recent years has brought new underlying assumptions and new ways of thinking. Expectations for how to construct Drupal sites have changed. The future holds clear decoupling with Javascript MVC frameworks, Web Components and some traditional HTML frameworks that encapsulate Front-End pieces that can work with multiple data providers. Can you make Drupal’s components be those components? Bonus: the phrase "Headless Drupal" will come up at least a dozen times.

Why is it important for your project?
Knowing the history of a system helps round out your overall knowledge of that system. As such, you'll learn how Drupal's theming system has been shaped by expectations of different eras, and how CSS usage has evolved, ultimately learning how to spot patterns that move toward the future of front-end development. In addition, you’ll learn the importance of discussing with theming choices with team members, and ways to future-proof their code and workflow.

Drupal 8: The Crash Course

by Larry “Crell” Garfield
Friday, June 26, 10:30am

What is it about?
One of the most widely-used and mature Content Management Systems on the planet, Drupal runs more than one in fifty websites in the world. However, it has always been something of an odd duck, with an architecture and design very different than anything else in PHP. Enter Drupal 8: almost a complete rewrite under the hood, Drupal 8 is a modern, PHP 5.4-boasting, REST-capable, object-oriented powerhouse. Now leveraging 3rd party components from no less than 9 different projects, Drupal 8 aims to be the premiere Content Management Platform for PHP.

Why is it important for your project?
A bit of Drupal 8 preparedness never hurt anyone. This session will provide a walkthrough of Drupal's key systems and APIs, intended to give developers a taste of what building with Drupal 8 will be like, and should be able to recognize common patterns in Drupal 8 development, and identify the Drupal 8 equivalents of common tasks from Drupal 7 at the end of it.

Design Systems and Drupal

by Larry “Crell” Garfield and Carl Martens
Saturday, June 27, 10:30am

What is it about?
Modern Web design demands visual systems that ensure content is delivered to our myriad devices, from smartphones to tablets to desktop displays and beyond, in usable ways. It requires thinking in terms of content that gets presented, often in a variety of different ways, rather than simply presentation. In this session, Larry and Carl will provide practical examples for how modern, modular design systems and practices can map directly to Drupal’s Views module, view modes, image styles, panels and other common site building tools.

Why is it important for your project?
You'll walk away with information that will help you leverage Drupal’s strengths through leading edge Web design, to both see and understand the basic concepts of design-system thinking, content strategy, and Drupal as a unified worldview that results in better, faster, and more consistent sites.

Technical Debt Insights from the Lorax

by Andrea Soper and Joe Purcell
Saturday, June 27, 1:00pm

What is it about?
Technical debt is a common analogy to describe the cost of code mess and poor architecture. However, how far can the monetary analogy go? In this session we will look at insights from the Lorax and “environmental debt”. Specifically, Andrea and Joe will build an argument for why the monetary comparison communicates the wrong idea about how technical debt is measured and how it impacts business. They will also include measures and practices to mitigate such technical debt.

Why is it important for your project?
If you deal with the challenge of communicating the business cost of technical debt, want a clearer understanding of what technical debt is and how to measure it, or want advice on how to mitigate against technical debt, this session will help. The goal is cleaner, more sustainable code and architecture for you, your team, your project, and the future.

On PhpSpec and Not the Drupal Way

by Michelle Krejci
Saturday, June 27, 2:15pm

What is it about?
This session gives you an introduction to the distinctions between unit, integration, and system testing, an introduction to behavior driven development (BDD), and, of course, using PhpSpec (a BDD tool) to isolate and spec out functionality in your Drupal codebase. PhpSpec is a toolset for building out testable pieces of functionality strictly designed to meet —and only meet—the project requirements that you have made explicit. Identify your inputs, test your expected outputs. That's it. The bigger question is: how do we as developers mature our skills and deliver testable, functional code while we continue to work on Drupal 7?

Why is it important for your project?
Proper testing breeds successful projects, plain and simple. You'll walk away with not only an understanding of the cost/benefit tradeoff of unit testing vs. system testing, you'll also learn the importance of building out custom functionality in Drupal using PhpSpec. The ultimate goal is helping you write better code and modernize your developer skills. Project Managers are welcome, too!

Heading to Twin Cities? Let us know in the comments, @ reply us on Twitter, or get in touch via email.