Highlights from DrupalCamp London 2018

Over the weekend, several of us in the tech chapter at Deeson attended DrupalCamp London 2018. It’s always a great event, and one our own Tim Deeson helped co-found in 2013.

For me, returning to DrupalCamp was a chance to immerse myself in the community again, to catch up with some old friends, and put faces to people I’d only met on Twitter.

The Deeson developers attending the event had different levels of Drupal knowledge, so we didn’t stick together the entire time. Due to my relatively limited knowledge of Drupal 8 I attended two very informative, low level development talks about the internal workings of D8 and how the approach differs to that I already know well with D7.

The first was Drupal 8 Services and Dependency Injection, an introduction to creating custom services to use within your own modules. I also attended Let’s take the best route - Exploring Drupal 8 Routing System, which showed me that while the change to Symfony makes the code very different, it’s actually straightforward and consistent once you get into it.

A particular highlight was seeing our Lead Developer Mike Davis in action. He spoke about Warden – an open source solution Deeson built to allow in-house development teams and agencies to keep track of the status of multiple Drupal sites hosted on different platforms.

Here are a few of our other favourite sessions and highlights from the event…

“Hello User, I’m Drupal!”

This session from Gabriele Maira introduced Chatbot API – A Drupal module which enables site builders to serve their content via chat.

We’ve been speaking about conversational interfaces and chatbots for a while at Deeson, and it was really interesting to learn about the tools available for Drupal site builders. With Alexa and Dialogflow support out of the box, Chatbot API module is one to keep an eye on.

Katy Ereira, Senior Developer

Drupal in the era of Microservices.

I attended a talk by Wunder's CTO Florian Lorétan, where he discussed the ideas around using Drupal with Microservices. This is an interesting idea particularly where larger projects are concerned as it opens up the potential for large teams to collaborate more effectively. 

We currently use Docker as part of our own build process (which could be considered a microservice) and I wanted to see how this could be extended further and what other benefits could be yielded as a result.

It was very interesting to learn that automated tests, benchmarking, security testing and monitoring could all be done as mircroservices with Drupal and how the speed of deployment could be rapidly increased by using this approach.

Whilst this is relatively new, it's great to see people within the Drupal community exploring how microservices could be used with Drupal to speed up the development process, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what the future holds in this area. 

Rowan Blackwood, Developer

Building a contribution culture in a Drupal agency.

I've joined Deeson within the past year, and one of the key qualities that drew me to Deeson in the first place was its commitment to open source and support for contributing back to the community. So I was keen to hear a little more about how other companies foster their own contributions culture and have the opportunity to compare our own culture with another.

In his session @hussainweb reiterated the added value that you can create for yourself by making contributions to open source projects, and how his company has found ways to actively encourage individuals to make contributions.

What really stuck with me is the following three items:

1. Open source contributions create Social Capital, and that's an investment you can recoup in other ways.
2. Contributions are not just about actual code contributed - it's also about bug reporting, documentation, testing, speaking and writing, which are just as valuable efforts, and they should also be tracked, encouraged and rewarded.
3. Don't be intimidated from extending open source projects. If you use it, treat it as your own upstream code and not a project that cannot be touched. Lose the fear of the project and contribute! 

James Ford, Senior Developer