I've always found that one of the best ways to learn something new is to get my hands dirty and start writing code. But it also helps me to have a project to work on, and a goal in mind. You could always go the traditional route and build a to-do list. I need something that's going to hold my attention a bit longer though. With that in mind, here are a couple of ideas that have inspired me recently.

Hot JAMS(tack): Building a Music Discovery App with Drupal and React
Brian Perry gave a talk at DrupalCon Nashville about how he created an application for visualizing trends in popular music using Drupal and React. It's an interesting example, and I love how he's taken something he's passionate about and turned it into a learning opportunity. Find something to play with in this huge list of publicly available APIs.

Thanks to Joe Shindelar and the folks at Lullabot Education for the nice shout out in the React for Drupal newsletter. Here's to hoping this project continues to be useful for people.

With projects like Gatsby continuing to grow, the static site generator trend does not seem to be going anywhere. While Gatsby can play nice with Drupal (this site being an example,) the process could be a little easier. As a result, I was happy to see the announcement of Tome yesterday.

Tome is a self described "static site generator lovingly crafted with Drupal 8." I think having a solid Drupal-only alternative could be really useful for folks who aren't ready to dive into something like React in order to use Gatsby. I ran through the getting started tutorial and while I did run into an issue with generated images, I was impressed with what I saw so far.

Sure, I missed the Friday night camp party to go to the Twins game for Prince night, but how can I complain when I got this photo out of it?

I wasn't sure I was going to be able to make it to Twin Cities Drupal Camp this year as I had a little too much travel lined up. I even went as far as telling Tim Erickson at DrupalCon that I wasn't going to attend. However, after hearing that a few other HS2 folks would be submitting sessions I couldn't resist. I eventually decided that I'd lean into the Drupal Camp wave and attend as many as I could this season. So I walked into the University of St. Thomas atrium with my head held high, but as a dirty liar.

Once things kicked off, I was immediately glad that I had this change of heart. Twin Cities has a wonderful Drupal community with a camp that is well run and has been very supportive of me and my craziest ideas for a few years now. I would have been really sad to have missed it. I was even able to continue the good community vibes with the first session of the camp I attended - Drupal and the Music Industry - Learning from our Success. Hearing about all of the music industry sites that are or have been powered by Drupal was a nice reminder that our work can impact the world at large, and even sites our parents and/or kids use. Who needs whitehouse.gov when we've got Justin Bieber?

The camp also served as a nice opportunity to catch up with past and present co-workers, many who were giving talks.

• Was able to catch Will Long's Next Level Twig: Extensions which gave a nice concise overview of popular twig extensions in the contrib space and examples of how to implement your own.
• Will was also part of the CiviCRM Secrets for Drupalers session which provided my first introduction to the CiviCRM project and some background on the Drupal integration that the folks at myDropWizard are building for it.
• In Drupal 8 Migrate: It's not rocket science... Jack Franks provided one of his typically fun and engaging live demos - this time doing live migrations against NASA APIs. He also gets bonus points for rolling with his computer freezing mid presentation, and also incorporating a partial config import into the demo based on one of my comments during the Q&A.
• Finally current HS2 colleague Chris Greatens presented Hello [user:name]: Personalization for Everyone which provided an excellent overview of personalization concepts, along with a look at some examples of some poorly executed uses of personalization. Those personalization missteps inspired quite a bit of discussion from attendees in the Q&A.

Component Based Theming With UI Patterns and Pattern Lab

This was my second time in 7 days speaking about the UI Patterns module, but I added a little Pattern Lab specific content this time around. It was another well attended UI Patterns talk which tells me that more folks are understanding the value in the functionality offered by the UI Patterns module, and also that pattern library driven theming workflows still continue to gain popularity in the Drupal community. Thanks to all who attended, to Michelle for this nice photo, and also to Eric from Mediacurrent who I had a chance to walk through the UI Patterns Pattern Lab module during a quiet Saturday AM BOF block.

Also in the general neighborhood of design components I sat in on Steve Persch's session Everything is a Block: How WordPress Rewrote the WYSIWYG. It shared some overlap with his State of Wordpress session from DrupalCon but dove even deeper into the new hotness that is the Gutenberg editor. While I have some issues with the underlying structure of Gutenberg content (tons of content jammed into a body field,) the upsides to a consistent block based approach in the editor resonated with me.

Given that, I asked Steve how he thought we could move to a more consistent use of blocks in Drupal. With all of the possible approaches to this problem in Drupal, he thought that the community needs to align on the things we want to stop using. For him in the past his approach was based on layout plugins (which aligns well with the experimental layout builder module now in Drupal Core.) Alongside this layout based approach he also focused on limiting preprocessing as much as possible so that the admin UI could accurately reflect what ends up rendered on the front end. The latter point especially resonated with me as it is a disadvantage of the common Twig mapping approach to component based theming that I think can be improved by the UI Patterns module or something like it. Speaking of that, thanks to Steve for giving a nice shout out to my UI Patterns presentation during his talk.

The last session I caught at the camp was Conscious Uncoupling -Drupal 8 meets Metalsmith. I was already familiar with many of the concepts here through my experimentation with Drupal and GatsbyJS, but it was great to hear someone else's positive experiences with the JAM Stack and decoupled Drupal. It also me amped to finally try Netlify, which I ended up liking quite a bit.

A few talks I missed but want to go back to:

• Progressive Decoupling: A case study with PRI
• Easy, Flexible and Accurate Drupal 8 Search with Dr. Seuss and Search API
• Drupal with and without React, a head to headless comparison

See you next year Twin Cities. I'll just leave this here.

So happy to get a chance to see my favorite @TCDrupal friends again this year #TCDrupal pic.twitter.com/XWlcF7Vh5X

— Brian Perry (@bricomedy) June 9, 2018

When I changed the conversation and started talking about ‘Building Blocks’ (what we call our Drupal paragraph types), site blocks (Drupal's search block, branding block), display types (Drupal's view modes such as teaser, search result), etc, they immediately understood.

I'm setting up some front end tooling for an upcoming project and was also considering not using the atoms/molecules/organism naming conventions this time around. My naming conventions will likely vary based on the approach to the build, but the general approach here makes a lot of sense to me. Not surprised that it makes sense to clients as well.

After that, I have Backstop.js set up to regression test all of these, so each time I create a new component I can quickly run the visual regression tests and check that nothing has broken. Since all my CSS/JS is scoped to each individual component, it's rare if something is.

This. For this next build I was planning on having full visual regression testing coverage in the pattern library and then some sampling in Drupal, most likely assisted by the Backstop Generator module.

As I've been learning about the JAMstack I've often heard really good things about using Netlify for hosting. I had a chance to try it out yesterday and I must say that the hype seems pretty warranted.

I often call my blog the least important site on the internet, but the real winner of that award is Camp Perry, a blog that I created as a joke for the unofficial neighborhood camp that happens in my back yard every summer. I wanted to move the blog to Gatsby and also take better advantage of the campperry.fun domain than I could on my current Github Pages configuration. Seemed like as good an excuse as any to try out Netlify. After granting access to my github repo, Netlify was able to:

• Automatically determine that I had a Gatsby site, and configure the build process accordingly
• Deploy a new build whenever a commit was made to the master branch
• For each new pull request, create a deploy preview site that I could use to sanity check my changes
• Use my custom domain (this took a little configuration and was the hardest part, but mainly because I'm not great at domain stuff)

All of that in a few minutes, and on the free tier. They also offer one click https, which I haven't gotten around to yet. Well worth checking out if you're looking for a place to host a static site build. I'd like to migrate this site to Netlify at some point as well to take advantage of some of the build automation and also https.

Update: with my custom domain stuff all squared away I was able to try the one click https features. One click to enable https via letsencrypt, a second click to force https on the site. Took about 90 seconds start to finish. And Netlify will autorenew my letsencrypt certificate before it expires. Pretty amazing.