Top 10 DrupalCon LA sessions

DrupalCon LA

So I did not make it along to DrupalCon Los Angeles, but I did spend some time reading twitter, and watching the sessions online. Here are some of the sessions I found entertaining and insightful and would recommend to others.

Driesnote Keynote

Dries, as always, sets the lay of the land with Drupal. He also goes into the early days of Drupal, and how some key people he was involved with and have now gone on to form organisations that centre around Drupal.

Best quote:

Obstacles don’t block the path, they are the path

No

Larry Garfield gives an interesting talk on why sometimes it is best to say NO in order to give focus to the things that actually matter.

Best quote:

Case and point, the new Macbook Airs, they say NO TO EVERYTHING.

PHP Containers at Scale: 5K Containers per Server

David Strauss explains the history of web hosting, and how this is now far more complex. David is CTO of Pantheon, and they now run 100,000+ websites, all with dev + test + production environments. Pantheon run 150+ containers on a 30GB box (205MB each on average). Really interesting talk on how to run large amounts of sites efficiently.

Decoupled Drupal: When, Why, and How

Amitai Burstein and Josh Koenig give a really entertaining presentation on monolithical architectures and some developer frustrations. And then introduce REST web services in Drupal 8, and how this can be used to provide better consumer interfaces for other frameworks.

Features for Drupal 8

Mike Potter goes through what role features played in Drupal 7, and how features will adapt in Drupal 8 now that CMI is in. Features in Drupal 8 will be going back to it’s roots and provide ‘bundles’ of configuration for re-use.

Meet Commerce 2.x

Ryan and Bojan go through 1.x on Drupal 7, and how they have chosen to develop Commerce 2.x on Drupal 8. This is a complete rewrite. The hierarchical product model is really exciting.

How, When and Why to Patch a Module

Joshua Turton goes over what a patch is, when you should patch contributed modules, and how to keep track of these with Drush make.

My colleague Josh also wrote a blog post on how to use Drush make.

CI for CSS: Creating a Visual Regression Testing Workflow

I topic that I am passionate about is visual regressions, here Kate Kligman goes through some tools that can help you test your site for visual changes. Tools covered include PhantomJS, SlimerJS, Selenium, Wraith.

Speeding up Drupal 8 development using Drupal Console

Eduardo and Jesus give us an introduction to your new best friend in Drupal 8. Drupal console is a Symfony CLI application to help you write boilerplate code, e.g. to create a new module. Personally, I am excited for the form API generator, and the ability to create a new entity with a single command.

For more information see drupalconsole.com.

Q&A with Dries

As Drupal heads down from 130 critical issues down to 22 currently, what are some key concerns by people. The questions are answered by dries, xjm, webchick and alexpott.

Where can I find more videos

Don’t worry there are plenty more videos on the Drupal Association Youtube page.

If you have any awesome sessions that I have missed let me know in the comments.