We are going to the Drupal Camp Spain at Seville

Drupal Camp Spain is happening this Friday! This year is in Seville, at the Faculty of Computer Science, University of Seville. From Thursday 21st to Saturday 23rd, including not only a lot of talks but also a Business Day where companies or individual freelancers can meet with other Drupal agents and share experiences and ideas.

Photo by Joan Oger on Unsplash.

Thanks!

A Drupal Camp is an event where a Drupal community can meet and exchange knowledge in real life, as opposed to the digital interactions of the rest of the year. It is the great opportunity better known these people,  these that you talk to in the Drupal chat channels or see in the issue queues, Twitter threads or any other Internet-based channel.

I would like to thanks the organizers, people that are volunteering to make this happens. They have work hard, believe me, they deserve message of thanks, so: thank you for making it possible!

In addition, there are many speakers. They also collaborate with the event without any kind of payment or compensation, you could say just for fun. People invest many hours in preparing their talks, so we should also be grateful to them. Ok, I am one of the speakers, but let me at least ask for recognition of all the other speakers that will be there.

Metadrop will be there

Talking about speakers, Metadrop will be there with four sessions and one workshop. Let me detail what will offer to the people coming to the Drupal Camp.

The Form API Workflow

This talk is the same featured in the past Drupal Con and Drupal Dev Days. Yes, I am touring with this talk. I could not be in a rock band touring the world but I least I am a Drupal developer touring Europe. And I don't have to deal with music critics or record sales so I think is better this way.

Come if you want to deep dive into the Form API internals and what happens when a form is being generated, rebuilt or submitted or how AJAX works. 

La importancia del QA (Control de calidad): Optimización del proceso y herramientas clave

This walk will be Spanish, hence the title in Spanish. My colleague Aberto Fernández will talk about the QA process, why it is important and will provide some strategies that work for us very well to optimize the developing process. QA allows to identify and fix errors sooner saving efforts and resources. We strongly believe in the QA automated tools, the safe net that allows us to focus on the new features and development instead of with with old known bugs or unexpected errors on production. Embrace QA and save your sleep.

Managing Complexity: Best Practices for Software Development Project Managers

Development is not the only factor in the success of a project. Jorge Tutor will talk about many other things that are very important for the successful delivery of a project. I honestly believe that development skills are key to this, a company or freelancer without the technical knowledge will struggle to meet the requirements of complex projects, but lack of management skills will bring down the most skilled developer. This is especially true when it comes to projects with many layers and parties involved. Jorge will share his experience and knows very well what he is talking about: scope, risks, stakeholder expectations, budget, team, communication, change management, team morale and more.

Visual Layout Suite para site builders con gran ambición (ambitious site builders)

Visual Layout Suite is one of our big bets for Drupal. The strongly think this module will vastly help content editors to generate their content. You could label it as low-code approach because with no code you will be able to create landings and components with different shapes and look and feel, including for example carrusel of any content. No need to code or add any CSS, everything is already included and ready to be use by the module. Cristian Aliaga, the main developer, and Alberto Ortega, also involved in the development, will explain how this works under the hood and show different usage examples. The module is under heavy development but already ready to be use in production. And if you want more you can always check the session at Drupal Dev Days Vienna (you can find the video in our post about the event). This talk will be in Spanish.

Boosting quality in Drupal

This year, a joint effort has been made to raise awareness of different Drupal testing techniques, with the aim of helping developers to ensure the quality of Drupal projects. There will be three related workshops on Drupal testing: Behat, Kernel tests and PHPUnit.

I will be the host of the first workshop. Behat is a Behavior Driven Development framework based on Cucumber. In our experience, it helps in several areas: first, it allows to define and run automatic tests on our projects. Because Behat is oriented to behavior we test the final result, so you can think of it as integration tests, with all project parts involved. However, I prefer to say Behat provides acceptance tests. And this is one of the key points: because you can write tests using natural language you can agree with the product owner on the expected behavior. And this is a big advantage because it kills any ambiguity on requirements: writing the tests forces to define all the undefined details that many times take lots of effort during development (messages, conversations, meeting to clarify, implementations that doesn't fit the product owner expectations, changes on requisites after realizing what was requested is not what the product needs, etc). 

If you come to this workshop bring a laptop with Docker, Docker Compose (v1), Git, Make and PHP installed and working. We will use Metadrop Boilerplate because it provides out-of-the-box a Drupal site with Behat preconfigured in a container infrastructure.

In the second workshop Óskar Calvo will explain and allow attendees to deal with kernel tests. Kernel tests are a great way to test module functionalities because the allow to have a working database, allowing a full Drupal Bootstrap.  Docker4Drupal will be used, so Docker, Docker Compose and Git are requirements to attend this whorksop.

Last but not less, Pedro Pelaez will introduce attendees to unit testing on Drupal using PHPUnit. Attendees will learn how to write unit tests to check functions, classes and methods, and how to simulate situations, verify results and automatize the testing process. In this case DDEV will be used, so if you plan to attend please install DDEV in your machine.

The workshops will be in Spanish, although non-Spanish speakers may benefit of attending (we will try to help all attendees).