I'm back from Lille!

I'm back from Lille!

I had an awesome week in France! It was my first time traveling outside North America and also the first time I visit a French town. French is my primary language, but Quebec french is a little different. It was a bit weird to go to conference where people actually spoke your language. French people still switched to english when they were not sure if I was speaking french, but still, it was awesome.

The food

There was a lot of great food, like the welsh with a slice of maroilles. The maroilles is a very strong cheese, but once heated up a bit, it's pretty tame.

I tried to eat as local as possible, but when I saw a poutine on the menu, I could not resist...

To those who don't what a poutine is, it's not that.

The sessions

There was of course, a lot of great sessions. I did go to Pittsburgh though, making it my second drupalcon this year. It felt a bit redundant, a bit too much.

A few highlights of what I've seen:

The Driesnote

The Driesnote was really great. They came up with a story of a village named Drupal, that was a bit sad because it was losing citizens over to new other village. It's a great retrospective of the other frameworks and CMS around, their weaknesses and their strong points as well. Even though we are an open-source community, it's important to look around to see what sticks and what doesn't.

https://youtu.be/tFxlDBLkLJc?si=WLoW8Wkt2jLN4gPa&t=186

Composer Behind the Scenes

It was a heavy technical talk and it was at 9:15AM. The maintainer of Composer goes in great length about the math involved around the package resolver. There was also a lot of stats about Composer v1 and Composer v2. Everyone who used both know how fast v2 is, but it's fun seeing numbers. I don't think it was recorded, but it was very interesting, but hard to digest so early in the morning.

KitKat and Jägermeister, using Drupal to bring their digital experiences to life

Another keynote, Jägermeister had a few slides about how they leveraged Drupal to create a personalized experience both for employees and customers. Their intranet and their public websites uses Drupal. I find this subject highly interesting these days. After doing so many websites that with a high level of caching to achieve high throughput, it feels counter-intuitive to bring personalized content into the mix and try to keep the same speed. It's a very interesting technical challenge, at scale.

I wish someone would come up with a more technical talk about this.

Decoupling your search solution with Drupal Search API

Decouple applications are fun to make. They are also more secure, as you usually expose less logic to the world, but it usually comes with some trade offs. Search is often time one of the trade off. You end up building your own interface to the search and it takes you 10x time it would have taken you with a regular Drupal search.

1xinternet wants to address this issue with a few new modules,

• https://www.drupal.org/project/search_api_decoupled
• https://www.drupal.org/project/search_api_decoupled_client
• https://www.drupal.org/project/search_api_decoupled_client_ui

They have clean approach and also demo configuration that you can replicate to your own taste.

Contributions' day

I could go on and on about the session, but let's move to the contributions' day! I wanted to contribute this drupalcon to the project samlauth, but issues with my laptop made my day very unproductive. I tried to update the patch with upstream and just ended up with a computer locking up every few minutes, plagued by red lines all over the project. This patch definitely needs some love...

Back in town

It's already been more than a week, my schedule (and myself) is slowly getting back into a somewhat normalcy. I submitted two talks to Drupalcon Portland for next year, let's see how it goes.