Next week we’ll be traveling to the nation's capital to participate in Drupal GovCon! While Aimee and Adam are veterans of GovCon, Lindsay is embarking on her first trip to the Washington, D.C. area.
Hook 42 will be presenting on a variety of subjects, including project management, module development, and component based development. We’re excited that Adam will also be delivering the keynote Wednesday morning!
GovCon is Wednesday, August 22nd to Friday, August 24th at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
Keynote:
Better Together: Impact Through Contribution
Adam Bergstein | Wednesday, August 22, 11:00am | Auditorium
Drupal is one of the largest and longest-standing Open Source communities; yet, it can feel difficult to make an impact. How do you find your place in such a large and diverse community? Many community members have made contributions to the project outside of code that have had a significant impact. I will share some stories and examples, to provide ideas of how you might be able to contribute to the project. And, using the framing of a “hero’s journey”, we will explore how all the pieces fit together to make a big impact on the greater whole.
The Drupal community has remained sustainable and vibrant compared to other projects because of the opportunity to provide contributions beyond code. Community members are able to provide both technical and non-technical contributions. In this talk we will look at the appeal of participation beyond just technical contribution and explore the interplay between contribution, impact, and alignment of our personal interests with community work.
When we all pitch in, we can change the world; because, every new contribution adds up to our community doing new and bigger things. Together we can all continue to create a vibrant community built upon our creativity, passion, and interests.
Sessions:
Healing a Broken Project
Aimee Hannaford (Degnan) | Wednesday, August 22, 2:00pm | Room: F1/F2
What happens when you encounter a project that seems broken beyond repair, but for whatever reasons, a brand-new fresh start is not possible?
You may run into the following challenges with these "broken projects":
- No clear scope
- No requirements documentation
- Far less remaining budget
- Far less remaining time
- "Project fatigue" from the client
- Massive amounts of technical debt
- And many, many more challenges…
How do you even start approaching such a broken project and bring chaos to order?
But what does order really mean? How does one measure success or completion in a fog of wrongness?!
Using project management and enterprise process management techniques, you can work through unclear and incomplete deliverables to help define what Done (success) means. This includes unraveling complex business logic, multiple business processes, and a slew of modules and configurations.
At the same time, we were proactively healing the client’s project pain by finally being able to articulate a clear list of what needs to be built versus what has been built.
Learning Outcomes:
- Starting assumptions may not completely prepare the team for the project.
- Identify and proactively address stakeholder’s project fatigue and apprehension.
- Explore practical techniques to unravel and define the half-built and the unknown.
- Understand that tools and techniques are really applying the “best practice for the situation” and which tool you use will evolve through the project recovery process.
- Understand how to prepare your project team for the road to recovery with the client.
Can We Figure This Drupal Component Thing Out Already?
Adam Bergstein and Brian Perry | Thursday, August 22, 9:00am | Room: Auditorium
Over the last two years our community has seen the rise of countless solutions to implement design systems and components within Drupal. During the same period across camps, cons and the internet at large Adam and Brian have been having an ongoing conversation about best practices in component-based development.
With Brian focusing on ease of component integration (often with the help of contributed modules), and Adam focusing on a platform agnostic approach favoring functionality in Drupal core, there was initially quite a bit of good natured debate. But as time went on and approaches in the community matured they found their perspectives aligning more and more.
This session will present their (mostly) shared vision of a set of best practices for component-based development. They’ll still disagree on some stuff, but that’s part of the fun. We’ll review:
An overview of current approaches in the community, along with some limitations.
Our goals for a component-based design system.
- Breaking down your patterns using atomic design principles to represent the ideal state of design system components.
- Managing your pattern library as an external dependency of your Drupal project.
- Limiting processing in your pattern library, and handling processing and mapping within your CMS.
- Common misconceptions about integrating design system patterns in Drupal.
- A baseline approach to implementation in Drupal using Drupal core and limited contributed modules.
- The role of popular component-friendly contributed modules
- Emerging technology for the future of component-based development.
Finally, we’ll go hands on with a brief demo showing our preferred approach in action.
Drupal 8 Custom Module Architecture: What’s Going On?
Lindsay Gaudinier | Thursday August 23, 9:00am | Room: Balcony A
It is all fun and games modifying existing code, but what about when you have to venture out to unknown waters and create your own custom module? Don’t worry! We can get through this together!
This talk is a deep dive into creating custom modules from scratch, and the role of each component in the final product.
Let’s consider when it is appropriate to leverage custom development, explore the anatomy of a custom module, the types of expected files in a custom module, and the wonderful world of what you can do with a custom module (spoiler - it is a lot!).
This talk will include: Composer uses, forms, theming within a module, custom pages, Drupal namespacing, object-oriented conventions, plugins, controllers, routes and more!
See you in our nation's capital!
Look out for some sweet Hook 42 sticker swag at our booth! We hope to see you at GovCon, and meet many new Drupal friends along the way!