An open Friday regarding Drupal

I joined the team a bit later and everything has been already setup. The day started with collective breakfast and today’s topics would be set up into two tracks. Everybody was free to join whatever they liked.

I grabbed a coffee and managed to listen to the last minutes of Lars demonstrating para, an interesting approach on how to execute the same commands over multiple project folders.

Next up was an introduction to the Thunder CMS, which I found concise and thought-provoking. A great presentation and a good introduction to the integrated features. I particularly enjoyed the following vivid discussion and its implications from a business perspective.

Then I joined the session where I could provide the most valuable input: Pattern Lab vs. Style Guides. We have been using Pattern Lab successfully at Factorial within the last couple of months. The Compress teams were discussing whether they should introduce it into their workflow as well. I was happy to share our experiences, the advantages of a pattern-based frontend workflow and the challenges we faced. Meanwhile, our very own Yevgeny held a presentation on Elastic Search within Drupal.

Another session was on advanced debugging with Xdebug and PhpStorm which I enjoyed, but didn’t have many takeaways for me personally (Sublime Text power user). And to finish things off, I joined a hands-on session of web components with polymer.

Conclusion

That day was fun and inspiring. I always enjoy meeting new people, bouncing off ideas and exchanging experiences. I would like to thank Ralf from comm-press for the invitation and his team for the superb organization. I’m looking forward to establishing something similar at our office. And then we’ll definitely return the favor.