Recap of Drupal Mountain Camp 2022
We thoroughly enjoyed Drupal Mountain Camp 2022! Hosted in Davos, Switzerland from 23 to 26 June, the programme was packed full of workshops, sessions, talks, and general mountain fun. Here are some of the highlights from the three-day event!
Thursday
We kickstarted the day by helping to finalise the last remaining organisational tasks for the conference, such as placing the posters, helping the sponsors get set up, and then welcoming the attendees. At least 40 people arrived before lunch. Many people began networking, and a good sample spent some time contributing back to Drupal in the sprint rooms.
The first workshops began after lunch with a learning session by Miro Dietiker and Ursin Cola. People continued networking and sprinting until the evening social event began. For that, we went to the Ice Hockey stadium for a tour of the new infrastructure and to learn about the history of HC Davos, after which we enjoyed an apéro provided by Amazee Labs. As an organiser of the conference, I then attended the “speaker dinner” which allowed many speakers to network with each other and share tips on how to overcome anxiety before their presentations.
Friday
Baddý Sonja Breidert gave the opening keynote speech entitled “Why should you and your company contribute to Drupal (and how)?”. Baddý mentioned that Drupal needs significantly more contribution in order to remain competitive in the long term. To achieve this the Drupal strategic initiatives will need to move even faster and a 500% increase in contribution will need to occur over the next 3 years to ensure Drupal remains the open-source content management system leader in digital transformation across all industries worldwide.
One way this can happen is if organisations do sponsored contributions, this currently accounts for ⅔ of all contributions. The benefits for organisations getting involved in contribution are multifold: it aids innovation within the organisation itself, it raises visibility and credibility which can lead to business growth, valuable connections are made through shared interactions, and it ensures a healthier ecosystem of shared knowledge within your team.
There are many ways to contribute back to Drupal, such as working on design / UX improvements, documentation, translations, event planning, coding, mentoring, testing, and marketing. At Amazee Labs, we contribute back in many ways, from helping to organise events such as Drupal Mountain Camp, to providing patches for various contrib modules.
After the keynote, we had a short break before starting the presentations and lightning talks. Sascha Grossenbacher gave a talk on “Entities explained”, with an extensive overview covering the basic field API, content revisions, content moderation, translation, and new since Drupal 9.3, bundle classes. Sascha explained how to access and set values, the do’s and don’ts of manipulating entities and field values, and how revisions work by providing various graphs to help understand the full revision tree when new drafts are created and published.
Sascha Eggenberger gave a lightning talk on working in an all-remote, open-core company. Gitlab has been fully remote since day one and has overcome various challenges to succeed. The company does asynchronous communication which requires strong documentation. Employees write down and record knowledge daily, but the work culture is that family and friends come first, and work is second. Taking time off is important to prevent burning out, and the whole team meets annually to get together and contribute.
After lunch, we had a few more sessions before starting two parallel workshops. Michi Mauch gave the “Lego Serious Play” workshop, which involved everyone building different solutions to challenges with Lego while learning about communication and collaboration in teams and organisations. It was great fun with many of the participants being thoroughly excited about receiving a pack of Lego to take home. By using our hands to talk, we were able to let our creativity flow with our three-dimensional Lego models.
After the workshop, we had an apéro provided by Monsteiner, a local beer company. Unfortunately, due to weather conditions, we had to cancel the social activity by the lake, however, many participants enjoyed a ramen dinner together and then some after-party drinks.
Saturday
Gábor Hojtsy gave the next keynote: “State of Drupal 10” - covering what will be in Drupal 10, how we will get there to release it, and how you will be able to update to Drupal 10. Gábor mentioned the plan for Drupal 10.4 LTS (long-term support) and Drupal 11.4 LTS, which would allow for 2.5 years of support between versions. Drupal 10 will contain the same features as Drupal 9.5. Drupal 10.1 or later will have new features such as decoupled menus, project browser, or the starter recipes.
One focus topic with the road to Drupal 10 is that many core modules will move to contrib, such as quickedit, aggregator, and forum. This will lead to a leaner core system and allow end-users to easily compose the features they require for their projects. One way to achieve this would be via the planned “recipes” feature, allowing users to create and maintain recipes that can easily configure and install a set of features for Drupal, such as a decoupled recipe that will install and configure GraphQL for you.
After the keynote, we took a short walk outside for the group photo. Then had a few more presentations before lunch. Ivica Puljic talked about “the Depths of Paragraphs” - empowering clients to build rich complex storytelling solutions with standardised workflows across various projects. Some of the new features to the module include the modal dialog, actions to duplicate paragraphs, a powerful plugin system to attach behaviours to paragraph types, and the paragraphs library enabling reusability and basic template support. A combination of all tools gives clients unlimited possibilities to be really creative.
After lunch, we had several more sessions and a final workshop before the closing session. The evening social event took place outside in nice weather. Overall, it was great to be back to in-person conferences and to be able to easily network with each other over a drink or two.
In total we had 73 registered participants, more than 30 different companies, and people coming in from 8 different countries.
As not only an attendee but also an organiser of the event, I want to thank everyone involved for making Drupal Mountain Camp 2022 a huge success. We learnt a lot, gained great value from all the sessions, and we can’t wait for the next one!