Drupal Developer Days 2023

Drupal Developer Days overview

After a successful first event of Drupal Developer Days 2022 after a pandemic break in Ghent, the event started this year in Vienna with over 300 attendees from more than 30 countries. A total of 63 sessions and 4 keynotes were presented in 8 tracks. The Drupal Developer Days focus on software development with Drupal and offer a multi-day programme with sessions for site builders, content creators as well as topics in infrastructure and tools. 

The event also includes sprint rooms where attendees can share and work on their own contribution projects. There will also be a number of evening events to round off the programme. Before the pandemic, Drupal Developer Days had already been organised by the local Drupal community in Milan, Cluj-Napoca, Lisbon, Seville and other cities.

Drupal Developer Days 2023

Vienna was a great choice for this year’s Drupal Dev Days. The Faculty of Economics and Computer Science at the University of Vienna was available for the conference. In addition to the various lecture halls where the sessions took place, there was also a roof terrace with an incredible view over Vienna.

Our contribution to Drupal Developer Days 2023 

This year we at Factorial were not only able to attend the event, but also to host some of the sessions on offer. In total, we presented 5 sessions on different topics at Dev Days 2023. In addition to community and contribution talks, experienced Drupal developers such as Kristiaan Van den Eynde, Alvaro Hurtado and Simon Bäse talked about their experiences in web development. Our colleague Alvaro presented twice at the event, as he took over a presentation submitted by our team member Joachim Noreiko from the UK, who was unable to attend in person.

Here is an overview of the recordings of the sessions we hosted at this year’s Drupal Developer Days:

Kristiaan Van den Eynde | kristianvandeneynde

How to write maintainable large scale software

Niklas Franke | HeroicNick

Beyond the code: Community engagement for non-technical Drupal enthusiasts

Alvaro Hurtado | alvar0hurtad0

Some tips and warnings about moving away from being a developer and leading teams 

Alvaro Hurtado | alvar0hurtad0

Why Module Builder should be in your developer tool kit

Simon Bäse | simonbaese

What we learned introducing PHPStan to a large scale project

63 sessions, 4 keynotes

The Drupal Dev Days 2023 agenda included a total of 63 sessions and 4 keynotes. As described above, the focus of the event was on software developers. However, there were also one or two sessions with a business or community oriented context. Below is an excerpt of some of the sessions we attended:

Keeping Drupal competitive on the modern web

In this presentation, Alexander Varwijk, aka Kingdutch, highlighted ways to position Drupal as a modern and competitive solution on the web, given today’s competitive pressures from numerous SaaS solutions. Although competition from other software is growing, Drupal continues to excel at handling data — but it is important to continue to position this strength correctly.

A Drupal core maintainer shares peer code review best practices

The theme of this session was for Jess, known in the community as xjm, to share with the community her experiences as a Drupal core maintainer in the area of peer code review. She focused on the importance of peer reviews in terms of increasing team productivity, cost efficiency and reducing defects (bugs).

ECA, the no-code solution that empowers you to orchestrate your Drupal sites

Jürgen Haas and his presentation of the ECA module brought another powerful no-code tool into the community spotlight. The content of the presentation included the structure of the module, the history of its development to date and examples of its use to manage Drupal sites of varying complexity.

CKEditor 5: One Small Step for Content Editor, One Giant Leap for Drupal

Vladimir Roudakov presented CKEditor 5 and its impact on the website editor experience. He showed how it works with Drupal 10 and the possibilities of creating high quality content with just a few clicks.

The present and future of Drupal initiatives

Gábor Hojtsy, a well-known contributor to the Drupal community, gave an introduction to Drupal initiatives and an overview of current Drupal initiatives, including strategic initiatives such as automatic updates and community initiatives such as Bug Smash.

Drupal 10: What’s New and What’s Next

Lauri Eskola gave an overview of the state of Drupal 10 from his perspective at Acquia, as well as a sneak peek at the 10.1 release announced for 2023. Members of the community can look forward to the improvements that will be made in order to make Drupal more and more of a software for the ambitious site builder.

In addition to these sessions, which mostly featured well-known people from the Drupal community, Drupal Developer Days also gave newcomers to the community a chance to make their stage debut, including Aastha Shrivastava with her talk: “An introvert’s guide to open source communities”.

Takeaways

The Factorial Team made a significant contribution to the content of this year’s event through the presentation sessions, knowledge transfer and sharing of expertise. In addition, the team was able to have many discussions with community members and core maintainers to further promote their own open source projects. Last but not least, the event was an incredible chance for the Factorial team to meet and spend time with colleagues from Spain and Belgium in person.

With the knowledge gained, we will now head to Drupalcamp Spain and DrupalCon Europe in the autumn — both of which will be sponsored by Factorial. We thank the community volunteers who organised and ran the Drupal Developer Days with such dedication. Other takeaways from the event will be summarised in the following closing session: