Once more we met with the Drupal community for DrupalCon US, this time in Pittsburgh. Even though last year was also an in-person event, this year the attendance was close to pre-pandemic numbers.
I must say it was my first time in Pittsburgh and I loved the city. Lots of bridges and the David L. Lawrence convention center was impressive. Continuing personal notes, I enjoyed getting back together with the Drupal community. Even though I followed their YouTube conference publications, I did not attend an event in 6+ years.
The conference had a similar, yet different planning than before. There were mainly 2 days with talks and 2 contribution days (back to back). For the first day of contributions there were some talks, but focused on different working groups. The organization went well, we got the chance to see interesting talks and visit some nice local establishments like Pins Mechanical Co.
In terms of talks my top picks would be:
- Dries KeyNote and focus on the S-Curves journey he described.
- Our Approach to Design Systems and Faster Site-Building
- Progressive Decoupling: Best of Both Worlds?
- Hot Takes! Javascript and the Future of Drupal
And if you have a bit more time I would also watch:
- Introducing Automatic Updates in Drupal core
- Advanced Render Cache Debugging
- Knowing and using new capabilities of CKEditor 5 with Drupal 10
And in case you have even more time here is the complete list.
Some news I would like to share which are interesting:
- Drupal 7 EOL - Jan 5th 2025 (this was shared within Security Team Panel - D7 End of Life)
- 2+ of the approved initiatives are related to Decoupled Drupal.
And finally I would like to advertise the Bug Smash Initiative which I contributed to during and after the conference. It was a rewarding experience and I found a lot of online/offline help (which really helps when you are trying to contribute).
In summary a great experience, a great city and great to see a lot of people from the community in person again.