DrupalCon Amsterdam Day 2 Recap

Let's take a glimpse into the second day of DrupalCon Amsterdam 2019.

We started the day with a short walk from our hotel to the venue while dodging thousands of cyclists during rush hour. Once at the RAI, we promptly entered the auditorium to start the day.

After kickstarting the conference on Monday with the first keynote from the Drupal initiative leads, we now had the delight to savour the “Driesnote” in full on Tuesday morning.

Dries announced that the Drupal 9 development branch is available and that 16% of the top 200 modules are already Drupal 9 compatible.

He then pointed out that the future will need to adapt to billions of more internet-enabled devices as the world will gain further access to the internet. Dries mentioned that in the future you need to:

• Be really good at structured data
• Manage more diverse data
• Manage 100x the amount of data
• Integrate easily with other platforms

What does this mean for the future of Drupal?
 

Looking forward, we’re almost at the end of the track for Drupal 8, so we need to start planning for the next summit. Dries asked us which initiatives should we, as a community, work together on for Drupal 9 and gave us his suggestions.

Directly after the informative Driesnote, we were then shepherded outside for the group photo. From the registration desk, I was informed that we have at least 1,400 attendees so it took a few moments before we could all throw our hands up for the official snap.

Before lunch, I caught up with some of the volunteers involved in the Admin UI initiative. I sat and listened to Sascha, Christina, and Archita iron out the last details for their talk on Wednesday. While I began to dip into the Design System on Figma.

Being a Volunteer
 

I find that the best way to experience a conference is to volunteer, therefore I had volunteer duties in which I was a session monitor for two talks held in the G106 room:

• “Before decoupling, understand JS. JavaScript for Drupalers: Let’s learn this” presented by Ashraf Abed
• “Storybook and Drupal: Seamless frontend integration for decoupled sites.” presented by Jamie Hollern and Mattia Simonato.

Both talks were at over-capacity with people sitting on the floor as well as standing at the back. I thoroughly enjoyed them.
 

A meal with friends
 

Later in the evening, I attended the official Drupal Switzerland dinner which was held at an Italian restaurant near to the conference venue. It was a memorable evening in which people from all across Switzerland as well as friends from Sweden attended to share and enjoy a meal together.

We ended the evening with a party hosted by Pantheon, which continued late into the night. Looking forward to another great day at DrupalCon.