DrupalSouth 2024 day 2 wrap-up

Beyond buzzwords: demystifying diversity and inclusion

Suchi: Amazing talk! Panel discussion of three panelists and one moderator, all from Girls in Tech. They shared their experiences of not feeling included at different points in their lives and what people can do to make sure that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is not just a buzzword (phrase) but is actually embraced in organisations.

Paul: Great discussion on diversity and inclusion. While the theme was girls in tech and the examples of unconscious gender bias and real-world challenges of the panel members made it all real, the most powerful takeaways were actually more generally about inclusion and providing every person an opportunity to be heard and succeed. Very simple message on driving inclusion, “Ask people!” and be observant to foster inclusion: “Invite those more passive to speak, control those who dominate.” Gender is only one facet of this, but a very important one.

Nathan ter Bogt, Components of a component

Phillipa: This talk looked at the design system process used within the NSW Government’s OneCX Program. Nathan shared a component’s ‘lifecycle’ at OneCX through the four main stages of design, solution, build and test. It’s a thorough workflow that covers SEO, personalisation and automated testing.

Paul: Interesting talk on the process of having a new component accepted into the OneCX ecosystem. It’s not as simple as conceptualise, design, build, deploy — the actual workflow has many more steps because the component is used in many contexts across the OneCX consolidation platform and has many stakeholders.

Gaurav Garg and Govind Kumar Malu, Simplify Drupal testing with Cypress and Cucumber automation

Suchi: Gaurav and Govind talked about the frontend testing framework Cypress, which along with Cucumber can be used to test Drupal sites and analyse results. They demoed a simple test and also talked about how these tests can be run not only for local installations but also for staging and production sites.

Dave Sparks, Conflict is information: Listen more, learn more, do better

Paul: David is owner of Sparks interactive (NZ Agency) and gave a personal account of his journey of running the agency since about 2005. He spoke of personal drivers and competing interests, which may lead to conflict. Conflict will happen but we need frameworks and structured approaches to reach resolution. A powerful, commonsense message, was to not start with “No”, but try to work to what is possible. A very human presentation showing lots of empathetic experience, he threw in a few tunes too in a throwback to his early days ordering CDs and records from the internet. Worth having a look at once the presentations become available to watch!

Ming Quah, Drupal defense in depth

Phillipa: Ming’s talk looked at seven layers of defense (infrastructure, container hosting, application (Drupal), edge protection, content delivery, people, and process) and what you can do in each of those layers within the NIST framework of identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover.

The CivicTheme gameshow

Phillipa: Four lucky contestants had 20 minutes to build the hypothetical homepage for Drupal Community Heroes. Homepages were judged by Sharyn Clarkson, Tim Doyle and Vladamir Roudakov. First place was taken out by Tommy Jessop. Congratulations Tommy!

Joseph Zhao and Steve Worley, Making sure GovCMS works great: easy ways to test

Phillipa: Joseph and Steve looked at the GovCMS platform and highlighted the testing tools in different layers of the solution, including Cypress, PHPUnit tests, Behat, Drupal Rector, Drupal Check and ShipShape.

Dallas Ramsden, Turning tragedy into triumph: Lessons in resilience

Paul: This is a must-watch once the presentations come out! Can’t really do this justice with a summary, but…Dallas was in a freak train accident in Thailand and was declared clinically dead. The cause is still unknown to Dallas 20 years later, but he suffered a massive head impact on a train and his skull shattered. After being helped by two medical students on the train, six hours later the most primitive hospital only wrapped his head in gauze. Helicopter rescue was rejected as he was so close to death the Thai authorities did not want him dying in transit on their watch. He had to travel back on the train another 20-odd hours to a hospital in Bangkok. He was pronounced dead at the hospital, however a Thai doctor took on his case as he had studied in the same university as Dallas (in Wisconsin). Eventually he awoke from a coma and started a very long journey to recovery, which was anything but smooth (the brain trauma had altered his personality, and he was aggressive and negative). Well into this journey, he was still bed bound, but some firm words from a friend turned his attitude around. A positive, growth mindset brought him back and today he's doing great work in Drupal (in NZ). I spoke to Dallas for some time after the preso. Remarkable! Best thing I've heard in ages. We all need to take 20 mins to listen to it.

Marcus Duhon, The importance and path to growing the Drupal community through marketeers

Phillipa: Looked at different ways marketing and Drupal can work together, including the Drupal Marketing Committee and Drupal Promote. Also took the audience through some perceptions (barriers) and how to address them.

Murray Woodman, The good, the bag and the ugly: project retrospectives

Phillipa: Murray used burnup (as opposed to burndown) charts to show patterns of ‘good’ project execution (steady diagonal line) and the ‘bad’ projects (e.g. flat line, stops and starts, fast burn at the end, etc.).

Amey Mudras and Govind Kumar Malu, Simplifying structures: exploring the benefits of Drupal’s Single Directory Component approach

Phillipa: Govind took us through Drupal’s Single Directory Component, including its benefits. Amey then did a demo, showing the audience how to use the Single Directory Component.

That’s a wrap

And that’s it for DrupalSouth 2024. The team has loved coming together and bonding, but more importantly being part of the ANZ Drupal community at DrupalSouth 2024. See you next year!