Drupal Dev Days Szeged, a retrospective

Drupal Dev Days this year found its way back to the location of Drupalcon 2008 - Szeged, Hungary. A particularly picturesque city, Szeged made a wonderful location for a great conference, and Annertech was there to enjoy it all.

The conference itself was a full blown marathon, with code sprints going on all week, and well into each night, and a full three days of workshops, BOFs and sessions. It was not one to miss.

There was obviously a Drupal 8 theme at Dev Days, not least because the code sprints were trying to eliminate all the beta blockers from the issue queues. Solid sessions on the new Entity API and its integration with the new Field API explained how they are basically now one and the same. Translation, authentication, configuration management and performance in D8 were all explored.

A rather interesting talk was given by Florian Loretan, of Wunderkraut fame. He was asking the question of when Drupal 8 will be 'real', or to put it another way, what does it take for people to use it on real projects? Out of the box, Drupal 8 is pretty powerful, and even now, you can find sites built upon it. Florian suggested that, currently, the system is suitable for personal sites, blogs and brochure sites. As D8 matures and more contrib modules become available for it, so its capabilities will grow exponentially. For example, rumour has it that Drupal Commerce will have a beta release when Drupal 8.0 is released, and that will immediately open a huge range of possibilities. Drupal 8's time is coming. For real!

A real treat was a re-run of a workshop from Drupalcon Prague. I really think that workshops are the way to go - they can be far more engaging than all but the most lively speakers, and the potential for learning is far greater! In this case, the Caching Deep Dive made a comeback, and I have to say it was really excellent. Campbell Vertesi took us through all the server side caching layers available in a high performance Drupal stack, explaining in an eloquent and entertaining style the mission of each component - APC, Memcache, Varnish - their differences, and how to make them sing for you.

Some other takeaways included
- a presentation by the guys at Happy Culture on caring for the 'editor experience'.
- a demonstration of a brand new front end testing tool by Timm Jansen - siteeffect.io, which is really brimming with potential and we are eagerly awaiting its full release.
- a great rundown by Klaus Purer on security, attack vectors and how to keep the enemy at bay.

But of course, Dev Days was not all work. Nights were filled by the sounds of happy Drupal developers having fun around beautiful Szeged, not least at the Friday night party, co-hosted by Freistilbox and Aberdeen Cloud, which even came with a great progressive jazz soundscape performance!

The conference was a huge success, and congratulations are due to all the organisers. The only thing that remains to say is: roll on Amsterdam!