Short after the official release of Drupal 8, a group of MD Systems developers joined the Drupal Camp in Vienna to visit interesting presentations and participate in the sprints to improve Drupal 8. There they could expand their knowledge, connect with other Drupalistas and work on Drupal 8 issues in the sprints.
Meet maintainers, develop strategies
Many modules already have a Drupal 8 release with mostly still alpha or beta version. A strategy towards a first stable release for every major module is currently the most important goal for almost all maintainers.
Events with meeting maintainers in person are the best way to develop a strategy that satisfies the needs of everyone involved and supports the collaborational work for the next months. Therefore, we decided to send nearly all our developers to the Drupal Camp Vienna.
But before all the work started, almost all the Drupalistas came together for the group picture. Yay!
"Entities in Drupal 8" and other sessions
Later on the first day, our group visited several sessions and was excited about them. For example, "How to run a remote business while travelling the world" by Karin Christen, "Headless Drupal 8" by Ruben Teijeiro, "Drupal for startups" by Kristof Van Tomme, "The backend of frontend" by Lauri Eskola, and many more.
For the last session of the first day they went to see “Entities in Drupal 8” by Christophe Galli (cgalli) and Sascha Grossenbacher (berdir) from MD Systems. Sascha and Christophe explained the differences between Content Entities and Config Entities and how the entities work in Drupal 8. Here is the link to the presentation.
Sessions, sprints and party
On the second day, the group joined several sessions about different topics where they learned a lot about UI and performance improvements, such as performance on a budget and running PHP on NGINX. Meanwhile, Sascha Grossenbacher joined some sprint groups where he worked on issues for Pathauto, Search API and File Entity.
After working and visiting sessions during the day, the team joined the official party on Friday and a movie in which multiple Drupal developers appeared on Saturday. There, they connected with all the other Drupal developers from Europe (mostly) and finally met the people in person which they already have been discussing with on the IRC channels or the Drupal issues.
More sprinting after the official event
On Sunday after the official event was finished, all members of the team went with all the other community developers to the sprints. There, they could already assist and support others, and of course bring some of their own issues a step forward.
After that weekend, the team not only learned a lot at the sessions but connected with the Drupal community, worked on issues and enjoyed the energy of collaboration work, too.
Images by Amazee Labs on flickr.com and Saša Nikolič:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/amazeelabs/sets/72157661554657052
