Drupaljam Utrecht

Good morning

Arriving at the Fabrique is never dull. On arrival, I was greeted with (really) fabulous dutch cookies.

Hacking the law

The very first session was about patents, and you would imagine that could be a rather dry subject, but you couldn't be more wrong. This totally relevant topic was brought up in a very entertaining manner by Arnoud Engelfriet. It was so good it got me worrying about my own presentation. I want to be able to prestn/entertain that good too.

The road to Drupal 11

Björn Brala explained in fine detail how updating should be done, what the status of the project was and which tasks needed to be done manually. A must see talk if you're into updating your modules.

My turn: Serverless Drupal with K8S on AKS from 0 to 100

I did not have too much stress as I had given this presentation before. What I was not prepared for was that I should start 15 minutes late and end on time. So yea I was cut short by the organisation mid slides. I did not like that very much.

Q&A with Dries Buytaert

I asked Dries what the plan is with D7. I personally like D7 and the many sites out there still on it. He gave a nuanced answer but I think in the end someone will need to step up and support D7 sites in the long run.

ChatGPT for Drupal content editors

This presentation from Vincenzo Gambino inspired me a great bunch. I already made presentations about Drupal and chatbots, but I loved the format and the contents of this presentation. If you have time for only one presentation. I think this is the direction content editors will want to go, so this will be very important in the future. He's a super interesting person and explains it very clearly. Check it out!

Scaling Drupal: High Traffic Solutions on Kubernetes

This talk by Mladen Stankovic was also cut short by the organisation. What a setup they have, 15k visitors per hour, 100+ editors, 150 nodes per day. I loved where he was going, and plan on doing something together with him because we're essentially talking about the same thing. One thing stuck in my mind though. He was talking about all the issues he had going live, and we had basically no hosting related issues going live and handling all the traffic (while both running on AKS). There must be learnings both ways that we can share.

Drupal Nomads: Crossing the Continents in Search of Code

These two fellas explained how it went moving from south afrika to the Netherlands. It rains more here and people have stricter timing (now now Afrikaans time). They told us it's quite the adventure and how starting over with everything can be liberating, but leaving your pets behind sucks.

Apparently in SouthAfrica kids go to school barefoot (and it is even encouraged) and this was confronting in the Netherlands. There they were asked if they could not afford shoes. To me it feels like a good idea to have kids walk barefoot more.

My takeaway here is the following: Uprooting is hard, and seeing kids struggle is heartbreaking. But they are more flexible and resilient than adults. When asked if they would do it again, they said yes.

KEYNOTE - 5 elephants and Céline Dion

Thijs Suijten had the last time slot to do a plenary presentation and oh boy did he blow the room away. I barely took notes because the story was so compelling. He did some really nice projects in Africa (to reduce elephant people conflicts) , tried to catch poachers and find bears in Romania. I want his life (that's the midlife crisis talking). Thijs truly masters the art of doing a keynote presentation. He tells a compelling story, shows topical, well made video's and teases you till the end. Amazing talk on multiple levels.

Thanks

To the organisers to make the conference a big success. The only downside was the program which was way too tight. There was no time for room switching and many talks/speakers were cut short. This was far from ideal. The content in the sessions was amazing.

Apart from that, this conference is absolutely worth attending.

Also thanks to Dropsolid for letting me be present at the conference. It's an honour to represent such a great company.

02/06/2023