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Nowadays everyone has an API and it's fairly common to want a website you're working on to fetch data from a 3rd party API. That's because pulling 3rd party data into your website can not only enriches your website's content, but doing so can prevent the need to duplicate commonly needed data.

API provided data could include displaying weather information, going through drupal.org projects, looking through census results, or even displaying Magic the Gathering card data. In fact, every WordPress site comes with an active JSON API out of the box.

There really is an API for almost anything. It's no surprise that you'll eventually want to consume some random API while developing a Drupal website. But enough of the sales pitch, let's get started consuming JSON APIs.

Now that I’ve settled back down in Alaska after a fun trip to Berkeley for BADCamp, I’m finally digesting all of the info I gathered throughout the week. As always, it was cool to look over the schedule and see what topics were getting a lot of attention; and, without a doubt, it seemed like GatsbyJS was the hot-ticket item this year. So here’s a primer on what GatsbyJS is and why the Drupal community seems so head-over-heels for this up and coming site generator.

Keyboard accessibility is vital, as many assistive devices emulate the keyboard. Using semantic HTML one can achieve an accessible User Interface (UI) with less code than non-semantic markup.

By managing and guiding focus with semantic HTML, developing an accessible UI is rather easy. Semantic HTML plays an important role in not only accessibility but SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as well. Although we are aware of it, it's often overlooked.

In September’s accessibility talk, Sarbbottam Bandyopadhyay shared the trade-offs of using semantic vs non-semantic markup with an everyday example. He also shared how to manage and guide focus. It was a brief presentation emphasizing the various aspects of keyboard accessibility. He concluded with a brief introduction to WAI-ARIA.

Sarbbottam is a frontend engineer, with more than 14 years experience. He currently works at LinkedIn. He is part of LinkedIn's core accessibility team, focusing primarily on web accessibility. He’s been involved with web accessibility since his Yahoo days.

HubSpot provides a powerful combination of customer relationship management (CRM) features and insights that can help organize and maintain business processes tied to customers. Drupal is a key digital platform for businesses, especially for inbound customer engagement, marketing initiatives, and 3rd party integrations. The two systems are highly complementary and deserve consideration for logically separating the responsibilities of digital engagement and customer relationship management. Additionally, both HubSpot and Drupal are very flexible and customizable. As an example, both systems support extensible data structures through custom fields in HubSpot and through the entity system in Drupal that allow for implementation-specific data to be stored and maintained.

The BADCamp Circus is coming to town for 4 whole days! From cities near and far, Drupalists are converging in Berkeley very soon for this year’s circus-themed BADCamp!

Join Hook 42 under the bigtop for 3 unique sessions. We’ll be sharing our thoughts on redesigning the Stanford Cantor Arts Center website, accessibility tooling, and creating custom Drupal 8 modules. Of course, the whole team will be there too, collaborating with new and old friends alike.

Join us as we flex our Drupal muscles, perform daring acts of development, and add to the general merriment of the Drupal community. BADCamp 2018 is sure to not disappoint!

We recently returned from Drupal GovCon and have some standout items we want to share. Overall, the experience was a lot of fun. It was exciting to get to watch Adam give the keynote on how to make an impact in the community. At Hook 42 we love giving back to the community, and it was a great reminder of how everyone who wants to give back, can contribute.

AmyJune is venturing to the Great Plains of DrupalCorn Camp to spread her love of giving back to Drupal! Not only will she be training folks on how to navigate the issue queue, she will be leading Contribution Day, and teaming up with Lisa McCray to promote diversity and inclusion.

DrupalCorn Camp is four corn-filled days in September, the 27th through 30th in Des Moines, Iowa.

Dennis Deacon has been involved in digital accessibility for the past four years, most recently as an Accessibility Engineer with The Paciello Group. He’s led the Chicago Digital Accessibility & Inclusive Design Meetup since December 2014. He is organizing Chicago's first Accessibility Camp later this year. And, he leads the curation of the 24 Accessibility article series.

Dennis Deacon spoke about starting the Chicago Digital Accessibility and Inclusive Design Meetup. He spoke about digital accessibility but focused on delivering the most accessible events possible.

Andrew Dunkle is the CTO of Go Overseas. Go Overseas is a platform that strives to help people find meaningful travel experiences abroad. They often describe themselves as the Yelp or Airbnb of study abroad programs. Volunteers, recent high school graduates, or anyone who is looking to travel in a more impactful way can use the site to find opportunities. Andrew and his business partner, Mitch, co-founded the company in 2008, while teaching together in Taiwan. They recognized the need for a platform to provide information and encouragement about taking the opportunity to go overseas and give back at the same time.

We’re excited to be offering two training sessions at BADCamp this year! Both of them focus on widening the reach of the internet and Drupal. Accessibility and contribution are close to our hearts at Hook 42 as they both are great tools for making the web a more diverse and inclusive place. The best thing about both subjects? You don’t have to know everything to dive in and get started - starting where you are is a great way to move things forward.