This year at BADCamp we had the opportunity to share in thought leadership by leading a training, participating in the DevOps Summit, and presenting 5 sessions with topics ranging from accessibility, git, project management, A/B testing, and contributing to the Drupal issue queue.
Continuing in the spirit of thought leadership, we also want to share with the whole Drupal community our takeaways, thoughts, and excitement about the new ideas and technologies we learned at BADCamp.
Takeaways
Aimee
This year, sessions focused on humanity and leadership drew my interest. John Ouellet’s personal account from addict to mentor and leader brought the room to tears while providing a sense of unwavering support that a) people can work through their problems b) they need to be given a chance and c) they need to have a good support system - starting with John. Carie Fisher’s Inclusive Development: Using Style Guides to Improve Website Accessibility talk was also a great tool for developers to think beyond themselves with design and implementation. I did battle the stomach flu through BADCamp and need to catch up on the videos. I was happy to have made it through to Saturday afternoon to present my session. :P
John Ouellet's From Homeless Addict to Winning Drupal: How a Community and Tech Companies Can Improve Lives. Photo credit: P. Vishnu Vijayan.
AmyJune
As Hook 42's Community Lead, the Hallway Track impacted me most. Meeting project maintainers and active participants in the Drupal community led to stimulating conversations that shepherded opportunities for how our team can become even more involved. Porting some useful projects to Drupal 8, continuing to support newcomers in the issue queue, and encouraging team members to maintain projects are a few of the plans I have moving forward after BADCamp.
Carie
BADCamp was a camp of firsts for me - first time attending, first time meeting my new Hook 42 coworkers in person, and first time doing a training session (Aimee led the SEO half, and I led the accessibility half). Overall, it was a great experience! I attended many amazing sessions, but learned the most from the Mobile and Accessibility session by Gian Wild from AccessibilityOz. During her session, she shared a lot of information and screenshots on how accessibility on mobile devices can be much different than on typical desktop/laptop set-ups. Gian pointed out that in some ways, accessibility on mobile devices is better: built-in native screen readers, text-to-speech recognition, high contrast and zoom options, etc. While in other areas, accessibility on mobile devices is much more difficult: viewing PDFs, controlling the autoplay feature for some media, various keyboard/hover traps, etc. It was a good reminder that just because your website is accessible on a desktop/laptop, does not mean that it is accessible on a mobile device.
Daniel
This was my first ever BADCamp and it was as good as I expected. The most memorable moments are the connections and meeting people face to face. Obviously, it was wonderful meeting all of the Hook 42 team in person. I’ve never felt so comfortable and welcomed on any team as I have since joining Hook 42. Meeting all of the people in the community that have had some sort of impact on my career one way or another is also very exciting. There are many folks in the community whom I’ve connected with via social media or emails, etc., and getting the chance to meet them face to face to say thank you and just connect on another level was worth the trip.
Hook 42's booth at BADCamp 2017. Photo credit: Mike Anello
Regarding sessions, trainings, technologies, etc., John Oullett’s session had the most significance. He is an amazing person and has had a huge impact on my career. I’m forever grateful for him for giving me a chance when many others wouldn’t. My favorite technical sessions/trainings always seem to be DevOps related. I attended the Continuous Integration: From 0 to CI hero training, the DevOps Summit, as well as The Future of Dev is Now!!! session. I love the work that the Tandem team is doing. Lando is an amazing tool and is making my development workflow easier to manage. I was excited to learn more about how to leverage its features and incorporate them into my workflow. Having a more intuitive and consistent workflow really helps me focus on my work so I can be more productive.
Darryl
This seems like it is the year of Component Design theming. There were two full days of training covering the topic (Component-based Development in Drupal 8 and Component-based Theming with Twig), not to mention at least 4 sessions that I can recall. As a mostly backend programmer, I took in most of this to try to keep up with the furious pace of change in front end technologies.
Genevieveveveve
I’ve learned that my name has a lot more Es in it than I think. I’m not as technical as the rest of the team, but the 3 sessions I found most interesting or useful to me were:
- Carie’s Inclusive Development: Using Style Guides to Improve Website Accessibility - it was great to have those resources easily organized with examples in one place.
- AmyJune’s Dred(itor) the Issue Queue? Don't - It's Simple(lytest) to Git in! - it was a great intro and overview into how EVERYONE can contribute to Drupal.
- John O’s From Homeless Addict to Winning Drupal: How a Community and Tech Companies Can Improve Lives - it was just such a great story. His willingness to share his story and his belief in mentorship were heartwarming.
Idil
The Human Side of It All…
Recently, our team met up at BADCamp in Berkeley for four days of technology summits, training and presentations. A few of us attended the DevOps Summit where a panel of speakers shared their experiences with Docker and Lando, discussed infrastructure automation and continuous delivery.
During a four-day event that includes everything from site orchestration to back-end design to front-end usability, infrastructure conversations tend to be perceived as being closest to "the machine" and furthest from human interaction. For engineering teams, automation is the holy grail – the magic touch that will increase our productivity and allow us to deliver more consistent results with minimal reliance on that error-prone human touch.
All of that is true, except…
We are not extensions of our computers. Quoting Steve Jobs here, “great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people”. It is only when we reveal the human within us that we begin to understand the behavior that rules our team dynamics.
For a team that works remotely - and in our case, does so very successfully - the opportunity to attend BADCamp, to watch our co-workers’ presentations and interact in person is invaluable. This girl still believes that our human connection cannot be replaced by process or data or automation.
I feel lucky to be working with such talented, well-rounded group of individuals. Here’s one for the Hook 42 team! Now let’s get back to our dev boards and web meetings!
Jeff
BADCamp was intense! I talked to a million people it seems. Met lots of new folks and lots of old ones... wait, that didn't sound right; you know what I mean. John O's session was pretty interesting. I wish it was recorded but there was some glitch! Learning about Lando was cool; it's sort of Kalabox 3 but don't think of it that way if you haven't yet looked into it; better to go into it with a tabula rasa. AmyJune's session about teaching newbs how to contribute patches to Drupal.org was great! I hope that helps folks... would have been nice to have that when I was learning :)
Crazy that we had so many people presenting/training this year. Kristen on multivariate testing, Aimee on Healing Projects, Aimee and Carrie on Supercharged SEO and Accessibility, Carie on Inclusive Development style guide driven accessibility, Lindsay on Git essentials, and Tara on AWS CloudFormation?!?!? Perhaps it's time I step up to the plate.
Carie Fisher leading Hook 42's Training, Supercharged SEO & Accessibility. Photo credit: P. Vishnu Vijayan.
Joseph
I went to the Backdrop Summit because I was interested in their progress and seeing what I can do with it. I usually just do backend and dev-ops stuff and I wanted to expand my knowledge, so I went to a bunch of frontend sessions, I really enjoyed Debugging JavaScript 101 with Israel Morales from Chapter Three. I also attended Amy Vaillancourt-Sals’ Demystifying Rendered Content in Drupal 8 Twig Files; it seemed like a really good introduction to making a theme in Drupal 8.
Kristen
I spent the first 2 days at BADCamp in my hotel room working on a challenging problem for a client. Let me say that I love Xdebug. If you are doing any programming in Drupal, especially in Drupal 8, it's a MUST HAVE. Dare I say, it will save you from madness. After that I joined the hallway track mostly for Friday and Saturday. One thing that I feel is special about the Drupal community is that we can hang out with competitors in a friendly and supportive way. We all want to build up the community and make Drupal a great place to be. We do that together. The better Drupal is, the more Drupal business there will be and the more work there is for everyone. So be nice to people. Help them. Be understanding. Be human. John O's talk really hit that home.
Lindsay
This was the first BADcamp where I presented, which has been a goal since I went to my first BADCamp in 2014. It was nerve-wracking, but exciting. I’m glad I was given to opportunity to help others overcome their fear of Git with Ready, Git Set, GO!.
The most important talk I attended was Carie Fisher’s session Inclusive Development: Using Style Guides to Improve Website Accessibility. As a front end developer, I went to all the new and exciting talks about React and how headless Drupal will Ichabod Crane us all.
However, Carie’s talk really put all this new tech into perspective. Despite all the interesting new things happening in front end (isn’t this always the case), front end developers need to be consciously aware of accessibility. With all the advancements of front end, developers also need to ensure that no one gets left behind.
Carie Fisher's Inclusive Development: Using Style Guides to Improve Website Accessibility
Oliver
This was the first Drupal community event that I went to that I actually felt like I was a part of the community. John O’s talk on integrating himself into the community being his path back from the brink of self-destruction was very impactful on me. I also got to spend a bit of time talking up the virtues of our team from the booth. I saw the people behind some of the technologies I’ve heard about and even recently started to use, like Lando. I met Matt Cheney from Pantheon and he was a very cool cat and we talked a lot about how he helped secure the EFF website which I found very informative and fascinating. I saw a few of the talks being given by my fellow Hooksters and found them to be incredibly interesting and informative: I thought I was an accessibility expert until I saw some of the amazing things Carie had implemented in the Grey Muzzle case study; AmyJune did a talk where she -- in front of a live studio audience -- patched a contrib module; Kristen introduced me to the world of A/B testing; and thanks to Aimee’s talk on Healing a Broken Project, I will never think of client interactions the same way ever again.
Ryan Bateman
Much like Darryl, I found that the hot topic of BADCamp was component-based design. I really enjoyed getting an opportunity to look at the techniques and solutions different groups are developing to make component development more frictionless in Drupal 8. Mannequin in particular has me really excited - the prospect of a PatternLab-like component library where Drupal is a first class citizen is really awesome! I’ve always loved doing front-end work in Drupal 8 thanks to Twig, but the prospect of tighter integrations with component design systems has me jazzed for where the next year will take us on the front-end side of Drupal.
Tara
DevOps Summit was well attended, the room was full considering engineers are likely to leave an empty seat between them. At one point there were only three women in the room and two were presenting.
Trainings that are little more than watching presenter run a demo should not be called trainings. Perhaps another category for the matrix could be level of detail: 1) What is it? What does it do? 2) How to apply it to your project? 3) Advanced uses, best practices.
Getting more meta, it could be interesting to poll the community for their burning needs before the call for submissions goes out. Folks are really interested in knowing more about X, can they learn it at BADCamp? Also, describing sessions less in marketing terms and more in use cases or user stories. “Participants will learn about the features of NewHotness.” versus “Participants will watch presenter run NewHotness and read output.”
The time for BADCamp has passed, but the magic, knowledge, and memories linger.
Join us at next year's BADCamp, October 24th through 27th, 2018! You can also catch some of the team at New England Drupal Camp November 17th and 18th in Worchester, MA.
Peace Out!
Artist: Aaron Deutsch