BADCamp 2017 Golden Gate Bridge Photo

This is my personal journey through BADCamp as seen through my lens.

Day oneBackdrop CMS Summit where many warm and insightful words were spoken.  Here are some of my take aways:

  • Two+ Years of Backdrop CMS ~ Jen Lampton & Nate Lampton
    • Drupal fork targeting small to medium sized businesses and non profits
    • History of Backdrop over 2+ years
    • Core enhancemnets, upgrade paths, roadmap for the future
    • View this session here: Two+ Years of Backdrop CMS
  • Fire Alarm!
    • Unexpected, but not a fire
    • We hung out in the court yard, networked and talked about Backdrop dev, Drush, and Lando!
  • Lando ~ Geoff St. Pierre
    • Lando is a local development solution and one way in which you can spin up, develop and deliver a Backdrop site.  

This session was not recorded, but you can see a similar session by Mike Pirog also given at BADCamp: The Future of Dev is Now!!! and you can see the docs about how to spin up a Backdrop site on Lando here: Backdrop Recipe.

  • Pantheon ~ Matt Cheney

Using Pantheon as a hosting platform for Backdrop CMS and ways that it can streamline your dev workflows, pipelines, and maintain a stable scalable site

  • Backdrop Core Dev Workflows ~ Nate Lampton

Nate gave a great overview of the issue queue, issue reporting, coding, review and even did a couple of live commits (a394d88, 5aae62bb)!

Day twoDevOps Summit Tech pipelines and optimized workflows.

  • Everything is DevOps ~ Michelle Krejci

This excellent presentation made an argument that everything is DevOps and particularly we should focus on the grey areas where DevOps and Development overlap to make streamlined, repeatable pipelines that deliver the best infrastructure, software, and user experience in a robust and scalable way.  Wow that sounds like a lot and it is!  Watch her session here: Everything is DevOps.

  • Docker-Driven Development Panel + QA ~ Moderated by Rob Bayliss
    • Cachalot/Pygmy
    • DDev
    • Docker4Drupal
    • Outrigger
    • Lando

Rob fired off questions at the panelists bringing to light some of the similarities, differences and their relation to Drupal of these docker-driven solutions to the local development stack.

The afternoon at DevOps Summit offered a myriad of talks on ChatOps, Elasticsearch, Behat/BDD, and Containers; I would encourage you to read the full list and seek out and research the people and topics listed on the BADCamp DevOps Summit page.

Days three and four: Sessions and Networking in the Sponsor Expo & Job Fair

  • Manning the booth

I had opportunity to spend some time on the Sponsor Expo & Job Fair floor representing Tandem my employer and company that sponsored my trip.  This was great opportunity to talk tech, business, and network.  Met many other businesses and people and had great conversations around fostering employment opportunities and business relationships.

  • Mannequin ~ Rob Bayliss & Jeff Landfried

Had the opportunity to catch this great session where LastCall Media built a tool to facilitate component based theming right in Drupal!  That tool is called Mannequin.  I encourage you to check that out and see how you can decouple your backend and front end workflows and get them happening in parallel.

Conclusion:

This was my journey and perspective through BADCamp 2017; there were many, many sessions, people and experiences that I didn't get to see.  I encourage you to take a look at the sessions that were recorded on the YouTube playlist.