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I recently attended Drupalcamp London for a weekend, here is a list of the top five things I learned during the time I spent there.
- The Drupal 8 services API is awesome. It was the first session I went to, "Drupal 8 Services and Dependency Injection" presented by Phil Norton. Phil was showcasing a few examples of how the services API has been used in previous projects, specifically the "Shield" and "PCA Predict" modules.
- Drupal developers are moving away from local virtual machines in herds, in favour of container-based solutions such as Lando or DDev. As these solutions become easier to use and more accessible there becomes fewer and fewer reasons to not give one of them a try.
- Chat-bots and personal assistants are a big step forward for user experience. The maintainer for of the "Chatbot API" module gave a talk on how to integrate a Drupal site with Alexa, Slack, Google Assistant, Messenger and many more. The video isn't available online for this talk just yet, however, the presentation slides are.
- Tagging Behat scenarios which only test important site functionality with '@smoke' can help speed up the development. When every scenario isn't run after every change, you can find problems quicker. Then run all scenarios on a nightly automated CI run to make sure everything is working correctly.
- The last talk I went to "Get Your Bits In! Using the Migrate module to populate your Drupal 8 site" presented by Eli-T, demoed the simplicity and workflow of migrating content into a Drupal 8 installation using the migrate module. The code involved was fairly minimal, not much is required to get going with the migrate functionality Drupal 8 provides.
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