What did we bring to DrupalCon Baltimore?
Aside from some awesome stickers and super-soft shirts to give out, we came with knowledge to share! Chromatic presented a total of 4 sessions, as well as moderating a Birds of a Feather session. If you missed any of them, you can read the slides or watch them online!
Dave presents "Culture is Curated"
Work/Life Balance - You CAN Have it All!
Alanna presents "Work/Life Balance - You CAN Have it All!"
JavaScript ES6: The best vanilla you’ve ever tasted
Ryan presents "JavaScript ES6: The Best Vanilla You've Ever Tasted"
Code Standards: It's Okay to be Yourself, But Write Your Code Like Everyone Else
What did we do at DrupalCon Baltimore?
Since Chromatic is a distributed company, DrupalCon is an important chance for team bonding. We went out for some great team dinners and drinks, hung out at the Lullabot/Pantheon party at the Maryland Science Center, and enjoyed the company of dinosaurs and a lot of great folks!
We also attended a few of the Monday summits: the Non-Profit Summit, the Media and Publishing Summit, and the Higher Ed Summit. We also had a volunteer at the Drupal Diversity & Inclusion booth.
What did we take away from DrupalCon Baltimore?
A lot of our team is excited about GraphQL after attending a session on it, as well as the ever-expanding world of decoupled Drupal. Pinterest’s case study on integrating Pattern Lab into a Drupal 8 theme got our front-enders excited, and some of our back-enders can’t wait to dig into the 35 Symfony components. JSON API has a lot of us pretty intrigued - overall, it’s fun to see what Drupal can do when you think outside of the box.
Märt thinks it’d be fun to code a bot so that his family has someone to talk to when he’s away at DrupalCon.
Christopher was happy to see that on the ops side of things, we’re up to date on best practices and doing what other people in the space are doing.
Chris and Elia at Camden Yards
We learned about debugging tools for front-enders, when to use {% embed %} in Twig templates and how powerful it can be in reusing structures/grids within another template. The live-coding demonstration of the back-end/front-end bits in a decoupled React app was really cool and informative. We learned about HTTP/2’s preconnect hint, which is an awesome performance win. We also heard about the importance of addressing mental health in the tech community.
Overall, we had a great time and learned a lot. We always come back from DrupalCon energized and ready to dig into new technologies, brush up our skills, and spruce our website - so keep an eye out!
