Another year, another great MidCamp!
I wasn’t able to attend for training and sprints on Thursday (1st grade play FTW!) but ended up talking to a former co-worker who attended the training 'What Am I Getting Myself Into? A Drupal Crash Course for Non-Developers.’ While it's easy to get wrapped up in the new and advanced at a camp like this, it is also really important to see newcomers, beginners, and people with Drupal-adjacent roles take steps into becoming more hands on with the CMS. She specifically mentioned that the training helped her have some revelations about a few Drupal-isms that us crazy developers have been talking about all this time.
After some really enjoyable traffic, Friday brought me to the first day of sessions. A couple of highlights:
Local Dev Environments for Dummies - the bulk of this presentation reviewed data from a 2018 Drupal Developer Survey, and the data alone was extremely fascinating. It also provided some interesting perspectives on Vagrant vs. Docker for local development (go Vagrant if matching your prod environment exactly is important, and Docker for pretty much everything else.) I also walked out of this one itching to learn more about Lando.
Decoupled Drupal Across The Stack - always enjoy seeing Preston speak about Decoupled Drupal, and being aware of his (and Acquia’s) perspective on the topic is important if I’m going to be speaking about adjacent topics as well. A good talk for someone looking to survey the current Decoupled Drupal landscape. Was interesting to see that all of the examples Preston provided included some server side universal JavaScript component to handle the initial page view. I’ve been working on learning more about the JAM Stack which specifically does not include JavaScript running on the server. Seeing examples of this alternative stack helped get me thinking more about the pros and cons of both.
Component Based Drupal - Surprise! After a cancellation, Adam Bergstein and I stepped in without much of a safety net (I learned that I was co-presenting this session due to a mention on twitter) to talk about the current state of building and theming with components in Drupal. I’ve always enjoyed my conversations with Adam on this topic because while we primarily agree, we also have some differences of opinion and take some different approaches in our workflow. Continuing this conversation out in the open seemed to be useful to people, and I even got to joke around a little bit. I wouldn’t be surprised if Adam and I presented in a similar format in the future.
Saturday - less traffic, more sessions.
OOP - The Pokemon Journey / Bending Behat's Benefits: A live coding adventure - A journey followed by an adventure? Hell of a way to spend a groggy Saturday morning. I love hearing from both Fatima and Steve whenever I can. The OOP Pokemon Journey was a fun and easy to understand talk on a topic that I honestly don’t yet consider myself an expert on. And Bending Behat’s Benefits made me anxious to incorporate some more test driven development into my process after some time away.
Too many cooks! Supporting augmented teams without getting salty - I wasn’t able to attend in person, but heard great things. It’s next up in the YouTube queue.
American Medical Association: Topic Landing Pages (A D8 Case Study) - an excellent, and extremely relatable talk about the challenges of Drupal 8 landing page building integrated with a pattern library based approach to theming. I’ve felt so much similar pain/joy on recent projects. They also closed with the reminder that we all need to look into how Layout Builder in 8.5 and the Layout Initiative will impact this process going forward, which I think is extremely important.
Hot JAMS(tack): Lessons from Building a Music Discovery App with Drupal and React -This is my attempt to demystify the process of creating a decoupled app with Drupal and React by way of a fun side project. It was my first time giving a talk that I’ve had brewing for a while, and I was happy with how it went. Heard a lot of positive and helpful feedback and have a few things that I think I can tweak to make it more useful for people. Looking forward to presenting it again at DrupalCon Nashville.
Plus, this was pretty cool:
Funny slide! https://t.co/LLqwuVXFb3
— Dries Buytaert (@Dries) March 11, 2018
Sunday was sprints, and unfortunately more traffic on the way home. I was dragging a little bit at this point, but still feel like I was able to get a few things done. I got back to the Foundation Patterns theme and responded to the first issue submitted against the project. I helped Tony Klose set up a Pattern Lab instance for a Drupal theme, and realized that I don’t have a clear personal process for including a pattern library as an external dependency of a theme. I also collaborated with Adam Bergstein a bit more looking at a possible React front-end for simplytest.me
A huge thanks goes out to the MidCamp organizers who overcame some pretty steep challenges to put on another great camp. I’ll see everyone next year at O’Midcamp!
Have been hedging my bets about learning Redux, but was getting close to taking the plunge. Now I'm wondering if React's upcoming Context API can meet my needs. Looking forward to more takes on advantages and disadvantages of the context API in comparison to things like Redux.
While Drupalers are rejoicing at these exciting advances allowing newfound front end freedoms, there are still a few hoops to be aware of in order to make the most of Drupal, especially for a newcomer who might be eager to shove aside a lot of what Drupal provides. ...things that are easily dismissed in a component-driven approach, like letting Drupal fully render fields, can cause headaches further on if they’re ignored, and make life difficult when it comes to keeping your front end forward-compatible with Drupal.
The UI Patterns module really does solve many of the problems outlined in this post, so my preference is to embrace that approach and leave these complicated presenter templates behind. But for those who haven’t embraced UI Patterns, this post really is essential.
When explaining some of the gotchas with this approach, I often use images as a simple example. Creating a component from scratch the instinct is often to pass in src and alt values as variables to get the cleanest markup possible. You can get that stuff out of Drupal, but it really is a pain. You’re better off just using the image markup Drupal renders, even if it isn't exactly as clean as you want it to be. Sometimes not fighting this battle at all is the right way to go. But if you want the perfect markup this post has everything you need to do it the right way.
Went down a bit of a CSS-Tricks rabbit hole over lunch today.
Started with Complexity. I've enjoyed all of the recent point / counterpoints about the increasing complexity of front end development. This is a nice summary.
That led me to The Future of Front End Web Development. Totally agree with everything in there, maybe with the exception of 'the line between native and web is blurring.' I'd probably just put that one in the future-future of front end web development category. Not quite there yet, but looking forward to when it is more of a reality.
And then that led me to When Does a Project Need React. The more comfortable I become with how state is managed in a framework like React, the more insane our old jQuery tricks to jam state into the DOM seem. That said, not all projects have complex state.
It's very hard to explain why, but I consider 'U Talkin' U2 2 Me?' to be the greatest podcast of all time. Possibly just one of my favorite things of all time. I don't like U2 all that much, yet somehow hearing Scott and Scott break down U2's entire discography over 24 episodes was something I saved for special occasions and often laughed to the point of tears while listening to. And boy, did they ever spend a lot of time talking about the band U2 (not really.) They even knew the names of every single member of the band. Truly encyclopedic knowledge.
And now Scott and Scott are back with 'R U Talkin' R.E.M. RE: ME?' in which they explore the output of the band R.E.M in what I'm sure will be painstaking detail. I like R.E.M. more than I like U2, but I can't say I would ever want to go through their entire back catalog. Yet somehow here we are again, and I'm excited to hear all about the album Monster. Listening today was just like old times. Can't wait to save for long road trips and laugh to the point of nearly driving off the road.
If you're looking for more info on what the hell this is all about, this Stereogum interview is as good a place as any. It might just confuse you more, which is par for the course.
Good ep.