A day at DrupalCon with Sarah

Third day of DrupalCon and the second day of the sessions was packed with awesome talks and interesting encounters at our Café Amazee booth.

Starting off my day with the first talk by Junaid Masoodi on Design Principles for MVP (minimum viable product). He covered the basic UX principles:

• Unity / Harmon
• Balance
• Hierarchy
• Scale / Proportion
• Dominance / Emphasis
• Similarity / Contrast

Showing examples like Evernote's or Airbnb’s onboarding screens, that users normally skip very quickly but still aim to give enough information on a company’s unique value and leaving a nice first impression.

The second talk I listened to was by Lauri Eskola about Drupal 8 theming in depth. Starting with an introduction to twig, covering basic syntax he dived deeper into some twig magic such as includes, twig blocks, embeds and building reusable component-based approaches. Stating that “Our deliverables should be systems, including components not pages”, meaning elements that are self-contained and nestable. The talk also included a high-level summary of Drupal 8 theming system and how it works in the backend.

Packed with methodologies and hands-on examples on how to get over some everyday struggles as a frontend developer, I went on to listen to another talk on the frontend track. The speakers Nikhil Sukul and Vidit Anjaria talked about how to Animate your site. They began with a short history of animation on the web: from gifs how it first started to Flash in the nineties and to todays CSS3, Web GL and HTML5 animations. Continuing with the 12 animation principles, they spoke about the performance of specific animation options and attributes and ended their speech with straightforward examples.

Meanwhile, the HoloLens was a big success on our booth, a lot of people came by to search and destroy robots. Never done that? Then come by our booth and give it a try, it’s great fun!

My third day at DrupalCon ended indulging in a very delicious dinner with the whole Amazee DrupalCon crew at Opium. A restaurant in the hub of Wexford Street, serving top-notch Thai and Vietnamese food. Beautiful interior and sparse lighting completed the impression but see for yourself on the picture, or better go check out their fantastic food!