DrupalCamp Transylvania 2018

If you were in the city of Cluj-Napoca between 4 and 6 May 2018 and walked around The Office, you probably saw over a 100 people from all over the world, wearing the same t-shirts, talking about Drupal. That's because DrupalCamp Transylvania was in town.

If you know a bit of Romanian history and have heard about Transylvania, you probably know about Vlad the Impaler. If not, then you've probably heard about Dracula. Either way, they're the same person. You may be asking yourself, "What has Dracula got to do with Drupal?". Well, the answer is in the picture below:

We all want Drupal to be immortal. Because we love developing awesome websites with it.  That said, we must remember one thing, it's not all about work and making money, it's also about having fun using Drupal. That was one of the key points of Robert Douglass' keynote - "My Drupal Mid-Life Crisis".

One of the most interesting sessions was Larry Garfield's - "The container is a lie!". On reading the title, you'll probably want to check that out, since you most probably use containers (not necessarily Docker containers, although Docker is probably the most used these days) in your everyday work. He spoke of how software runs on modern Linux systems, that we should not think of boats, whales or shipping or even Docker when we hear the word container, and why it is actually useful that modern software is built (runs) on these "lies". These "lies" form part of our everyday work, and more importantly, the deployment to different environments makes it so much easier.

Another very important topic, not only in the Drupal community but in technology in general, is GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Balu Ertl had a great session entitles, Overview of GDPR modules for Drupal, in which he provided an overview of all the modules in Drupal that can help your Drupal site achieve GDPR compliance.

The conclusion was that we have quite a few modules (9) in this category, some of them available on both Drupal 7 and 8. Some of them implement a small part of the regulations (like the consent for using personal data, the possibility to delete or download all the personal data of a user, the possibility to anonymize user information when dumping a production database, etc.) and many of them implement overlapping features.

But there seems to be one module, General Data Protection Regulation, which tries to bring all these modules together under one umbrella so that we can have a unified and clear solution for making a site GDPR compliant.

Another thing that came up during the discussions about this subject, was that this is a really complicated subject for both technical and legal minds, and as such, you'll most probably not be fined immediatly if you're not 100% GDPR compliant on the 26th of May 2018. The most likely scenario is that the authorities will be there to help at first, and only fine you as a last resort. That said, this cannot be confirmed and everything should still be done to be GDPR compliant by the deadline.

Wait, there's more! While attending Lenard Palko's presentation, we saw this:

No, we did not watch an episode from Doc McStuffins. This was about Auditing PHP Applications, a session in which Lenard Palko showed us how his team is dealing with auditing PHP applications and what things should we look for when having to do such an audit. He also shared some helpful tools that you should use and how should you structure the report.

As you can see it was a great DrupalCamp. Nice location, great presenters, lots of people and a dedicated sprint room. So, did we have any time for doing other stuff than coding and talking about Drupal? Yes, we did! We had some great parties each evening and a brave few of us even went for a morning run on Saturday.

I'm already looking forward to the next DrupalCamp Transylvania in 2019. See you there!