DrupalCon 2022 in Prague from a web developer’s perspective
DrupalCon 2022 in Prague from a web developer’s perspective
On 20th September 2022 I had a chance to visit DrupalCon in Europe which took place in Prague, a wonderful capital of the Czech Republic. I went there with my 3 other colleagues that were looking for business-related sessions, as well as project management topics. I was strictly focused on technical presentations as I have 7 years of experience in PHP programming and over 2 years in Drupal. Mainly 8 and 9.
Participating in the opening ceremony in an auditorium packed with over 1000 people was terrific. I was excited to see so many people working in Drupal in one room. In addition, there were software developers that visited DrupalCon for the 10th time!
There were excellent presentations about the new Drupal 10 coming out in December, discussion panels, case studies and technical solutions to the daily challenges of web developers.
DrupalCons are mainly addressed to the community of Drupal engineers. But many keynotes were business-related, with vendors presenting web solutions and companies showing off their projects.
It was also a great occasion to have a handshake and grab a beer with people you worked remotely with for most of the year.
The most interesting parts of the conference included the following:
„Drupal Performances from real production projects”
One of the most remarkable presentations was Drupal Performances from real production projects” with many heavily technical tips and tricks about how to make Drupal work better; how to optimise Drupal itself and the infrastructure behind it;
Upcoming Improvements to Drupal
Another highlight was the upcoming improvements to the Drupal ecosystem, including Project Browser, Project Update Bot, Distributions & Recipes, GitLab Acceleration Update.
„Best Practices for long-term management of Drupal Sites”
The other presentation I attended was „Best Practices for long-term management of Drupal Sites”. The presenter talked about what to keep in mind when preparing large sites so that maintaining them long-term doesn't become a problem and will become a smooth ride. Everything was based on his 14-years of experience in Drupal development. These kinds of sessions were the most interesting as I could benefit from the knowledge of people with vast commercial knowledge and expertise.
Driesnote
Working in Drupal for many years allowed me to enjoy the keynote of Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, who was born in Belgium. He shared his thoughts about the state of the Drupal project and its future. It was great to see the guy who started this huge Drupal movement years ago. Dries is also a co-founder and CTO of Acquia - a company that provides enterprise solutions for businesses that want to implement Drupal on a full scale. Acquia products include dedicated Drupal hosting, Site Factory solutions to manage hundreds of websites and Campaign Monitor to run marketing automation campaigns.
The interesting part of the conference was that people who couldn’t attend it could have bought tickets to watch all the sessions online for just 60EUR.