Drupalcon Atlanta 2025
I attended Drupalcon in Atlanta this week. It was very interesting.
With the release of Drupal CMS earlier this year, Drupal is moving faster towards a more mainstream, non-developer focused experience where a typical site builder can spin up a site and configure it without needing to crack open PHP files. I am particularly excited to see the implementation of their Experience Builder project, which is a drag-and-drop layout system that leverages their Single Directory Components as well as a few other edge features to completely change how you build sites in Drupal.
I was a bit disappointed (personally) in how much each session was polluted with "AI" discussions, and some of the talks centered around it alarmed me with how much people just implicitly trust the output from LLMs. I've been burned too many times with blatantly incorrect output from LLM chatbots, so I'm very skeptical on how useful they can be. Experience Builder plans on integrating LLMs into the UI as well, but the intention is to essentially bootstrap new components quickly, which I think is acceptable and useful. I'm just not a fan of the mindset that it's acceptable to just get a huge load of garbage code from an LLM and remove the incorrect parts of it, and that's being normalized as development nowadays. Call me an old man, but I'd rather spend time thinking about the right kind of code for the job rather than sifting through trash to get what I need.
I took a training course on Monday about custom module development, and ended up learning a lot about Object Oriented PHP that I didn't know, like Enums and interfaces. It was existing material from a full training class the company sponsoring the workshop offered, and we only got as far as learning how to write services, but it was still very informative. The same company (DebugAcademy) offers courses that help train for Acquia certifications, and I'm interested in getting another cert (or three) so maybe I will look into that later this year.
Atlanta is a nice city. The metro line was a bit scary (to me, a white dude with insecurity and anxiety) but I was able to figure it out. On the way back to the airport, there were at least three people who were just blasting music around themselves, instead of using headphones. The train also just randomly stopped for about a minute or two before reaching the airport station. The weather was great, and a lot warmer than Pittsburgh is right now. The city proper reminded me a lot of Pittsburgh in some of the architecture and street layout.
I also ran into a former co-worker from Barkley, and that was really nice! I miss that development team a lot, but the company has changed quite significantly since I left, so I feel like I made a good decision.
Here are some of my key takeaways from the conference:
- DrupalCMS is an exciting project, but we (CMU) are too big to need it. I'm still happy it's happening.
- Experience Builder will literally change how people build Drupal themes.
- The Drupal Association is considering having a theme marketplace, which I think is a MUCH NEEDED thing.
- Everyone is trying to cram "AI" into their stuff, and some implementations make less sense than others.
- Always have backup plans in case your travel partners mysteriously vanish.
Next Drupalcon in North America will be in Chicago, which I have only been to once.
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