Usually I do a big rundown of Drupalcamp London, trying to tease out themes, talking about bigger pictures and patterns. This year, however:
- I spent much of the camp volunteering (which, incidentally, was an absolute lark—except once my sprained ankle swelled up), so I was sometimes room-monitoring and therefore not necessarily following my nose when it came to talks;
- and I've gone straight from the camp into a three-day onsite client meeting, meaning I can only spend so much time writing blogposts.
With both those limitations in mind, I'm afraid that this year you're just going to get a bullet-pointed list of thoughts I had during and since:
- Drupalers are lovely. I had a great meal with a few of them on the Friday, and I wish that my sprained ankle hadn't been agony on the Saturday, or that I'd had to run over to Hackney, because now I miss them all!
- The Friday CxO day gets warmer each year, and for the few hours I was helping out it was hot: maybe 50% busier than last year. Cheap tickets for freelancers remain super-cheap, so I'm tempted to go back in 2018.
- Drupal 8 is standard. All energy is moving towards it, and every new release brings new functionality. If your favourite module isn't yet available for D8, you'd be better off writing (or getting someone to write) some bridging code, than using D7. Bridging code is really clean in D8, so don't be afraid.
- D8's improved architecture has given Xdebug a shot in the arm. Dust it down, even if you've got Vim or a command line.
- D8 Commerce 2.x might still beta, but it's fully featured. The project has a roadmap. The code is strongly entity- and view-based and so core does all the heavy lifting. From a standing start, it took Scott Hooker only six hours to build a Stripe payment plugin.
- Webform in D8 is also amazing.
- Twig should be seen as its own language, with its own syntax, power and features, as far as templating is concerned. Let it do the heavy lifting, whenever you need to generate output without side effects.
- Open source is inherently and thrillingly political, and all about individuals not corporations, and for her part Danese Cooper is an inspiring speaker.
That's about it. Now, look, if you don't mind, I've really got to go. We've a workship including contextual enquiries tomorrow. And I'd like to see you get to sleep when your hotel room overlooks Hackney Central rail station.
See you at Drupalcamp London 2018? I'll be volunteering, and maybe you will be too!
