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weKnow’s Best Of BADCamp 2017

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BADCamp holds a special place in the history of weKnow. Kenny Abarca and Enzo Garcia co-founders of the company, had their first foray into the Drupal community at BADCamp 7 years ago. Enzo and Jesús met at BADCamp, and this meeting changed the trajectory of the Drupal Console as we know it. So this time around Jesús and Omar had the ‘grueling’ task to represent the weKnow team in the Bay Area. We highly recommend placing BADCamp on your bucket list, there are no words to describe the atmosphere, maybe … ‘the Woodstock of the Drupal calendar’?

So here are our highlights after interviewing Jesús and Omar, besides the social events, BADCamp offers a lot of insight on innovations and the general direction of the Drupal project.

Omar goes to BADCAMP 2017

Omar pointed out that he noticed that the camp focused, and was split, around two themes that are currently abuzz in the Drupal kingdom, Theming and DevOps. For theming, he was quick to point out how Twig has continued to make a massive impact in the frontend sector.

“The arrival of engine templates like Twig, has helped avoid ‘drupalism’ in how we create themes for Drupal, this is a great step for the productivity during the development process, the theming focuses on components, allowing us to work independently in the theming layer of the Drupal backend and site building, without the need to think in an integrated architecture perspective. The complexity to a big group of front end developers, without Drupal knowledge in theming, was one of the main reasons to use decoupled architecture in Drupal 8, it’s definitely one of the best things Drupal 8 has to offer” Omar added.

According to Omar, discussions around the DevOps subject seemed to revolve mostly around enterprise development needs. This ranged from workflow to testing and using bots to automate the quality assurance.

Jesús goes to BADCAMP 2017

Jesús took the opportunity to give a talk on creating, building, testing and deploying Drupal 8. He shared tools that are helpful in the process of setting up the local development environment and how to make use of them for a successful deployment.

“Everything is Docker!”

That was Jesús’s simple reply to the question “What were your BADCamp highlights?”

Jesús added that it looked like every Drupal developer was attracted to Docker’s flexibility and was quickly becoming the preferred setup for the local development environment. He based his observation on the emergence of a myriad of tools that simplify Docker setup such as Lando, Docksal, DrupalVM.

“This is a natural evolution when you realize creating and building a Drupal 8 site is more complex than previous versions. In order to start working on a Drupal 8 site, your local environment requires some tools; a package manager as composer for handling the site dependencies and talking about theming something similar is happening since you will be probably using gulp or npm.” Jesús added.

Serverless + FaaS

As Jesús has come to learn, a lot of the nuggets of innovation are hidden deep in the hallways of Drupal events. One such nugget was acquired while in a conversation with Thom Toogood from Australia. Thom introduced him to ‘Composer as a Service’, a project he is working on using , which is an open source framework that you can use to run any CLI-driven binary program embedded in a Docker container… making it a Function as a Service.

GatsbyJS Drupal Plugin

One of the main highlights for Jesús came in the last session he attended, about a static site generator, GatsbyJS. It’s based on ReactJS and packs some awesome benefits, just to name a few;

  • Takes advantage of React.js, Webpack and modern JavaScript and CSS.
  • Pre-build pages to load flat files and avoid accessing expensive server side resources.
  • Pre-fetches page’s resources as JS, CSS and other pages. This makes navigate the site feels really fast.

The session also included a live demo showing the Gatsby source Drupal plugin that allows you to build static sites using Drupal as the source data.

Interesting Tools Discovered at BADCAMP

Most Interesting Sessions of BADCAMP 2017