At DrupalCon Baltimore, Preston So and I came up with an idea for a new Drupal conference, specifically focused on decoupled architectures, aimed at helping establish best practices and seeding a discussion about where Drupal as a whole is heading. Just a few short months have passed since then, and I’m excited that our first edition of Decoupled Dev Days is right around the corner. Let’s take a quick look at what will be going on at the event and what we hope to achieve.
Who Should Attend?
Decoupled Dev Days is a small developer-focused conference for architects, developers, and businesspeople involved in implementing decoupled Drupal architectures. The 2017 edition is scheduled for August 19–20, 2017 at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, in New York City. Our mission is threefold: to share best practices in sessions, engage with difficult shared problems in discussions, and to build open-source projects in sprints. To that end, August 19th will be a single track of sessions, and August 20th will be a full day of sprints on open sourced decoupled Drupal projects.
Speaker lineup
We have an exciting lineup of speakers from three broad categories: those working to make Drupal’s core and contributed ecosystem more suitable for decoupled architectures, those working on consuming technologies like JavaScript frameworks, and those who are involved in building decoupled Drupal sites today. Our speaker lineup includes core team members from two of the major Javascript frameworks: Ed Faulkner from the Ember team and Stephen Fluin on Google’s Angular team. It also includes contributors to Drupal’s API-first distributions, Contenta and Reservoir, as well as a great mixture of architects, developers, and business decision makers from numerous Drupal shops and enterprise companies.
Coming Together
As I stated in my last blog post about Contenta Angular, one problem encountered by those interested in exploring decoupled Drupal is that there has not been an organized set of best practices outlining how to decouple. Different companies have been solving and re-solving the same problems in isolation. It is our hope that having a dedicated conference on the topic will be another way we can take the lessons we’ve all learned through decoupling in practice, and bring those back to the community as either documented approaches or, even better, open sourced tools and examples.
Not able to attend?
Of course we recognize that not everyone with an interest in these topics can be in NYC on August 19-20, but there are several other ways to get engaged. All our sessions will be recorded, and if you follow our twitter we will be sure to post updates when those recordings go online. If you’d like to join the broader conversation, the Drupal slack is a great way to reach the people working on this topic. I would recommend joining and saying hello in the #decoupled, #contenta, or #reservoir channels.
Drupal’s future
Content is no longer about websites alone - it is instead multi-channel. Drupal’s value proposition in a world of mobile phones, wearables, IoT devices, and JavaScript frameworks is proportional to its ability to provide compelling experiences regardless of the device used to engage with that content.
Register and join us!
We are excited to see how a focused event about these realities can help surface new tools and ideas, and we hope you’ll be able to join us in that discovery. See you at 30 Rock!