Each year, BADCamp spotlights amazing talent in our industry, featuring dozens of high-quality sessions by talented individuals, including greg.1.anderson, webchick, robbayliss, jmolivas, and our own annabella, to name a few. The event helps all attendees connect with new ideas to up our development game. I had many favorites over the four-day event that included both sessions and trainings.
Automate Your Automation presented by greg.1.anderson was a huge favorite of mine. As a developer in a DevOps role, I loved learning about the time I could save by completing tasks in an automated fashion or allowing a robot to handle them for me. Greg shared some basic automation examples using familiar tools like github, circleci, and composer.
The session spoke to me personally and hit on a number of key points I have encountered in my own work, for example:
- Manual work is prone to error
- Repetitive work can become boring and tedious.
- Automating tasks makes them more reliable and repeatable
Working at Kanopi, we are always trying to find ways to maximize efficiency and results for our clients. For example, it would be great to be able to automate common tasks like Drupal and WordPress updates to make them quick, efficient and accurate. Greg helped me think about ways that we could start to make this happen.
Another favorite at BADCamp 2017 was hearing volkswagenchick’s talk: Dred(itor) the Issue Queue? Don’t – It’s Simple(lytest) to Git in! Their session touched on getting involved in Drupal.org’s Issue Queue, including helpful tools to use and all the different roles that are needed. You don’t have to be a developer to help test bugs! In fact, even the least technical person can still help out.
Lastly, I enjoyed seeing webchick’s presentation about Drupal 9 and Backward Compatibility. She provided a much deeper dive into Dries’ DrupalCon Baltimore Keynote, sharing how much easier it will be to go from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 then it has been in the past, which is great news for all of us! Previously, going from one major version of Drupal to another has been significantly harder, but that will no longer be the case. I was also excited to hear about some of the new initiatives that are planned, such as Migrate UI, Media, Layout, API First, and Automated Updates.
I was proud to be a part of the organizing team for BADCamp 2017. It was my first year, and the event blew all of my expectations out of the water. I hope to see even more Drupal Community members in Berkeley for BADCamp 2018.
