DrupalSouth 2024 day 1 wrap-up

Dries Buytaert, Drupal: past, present and future

Phillipa: Dries’s keynote gave a great insight into his journey, from coding at university to building Drupal as an enterprise-grade content management system (CMS). The focus for the future was on innovation (to keep Drupal as a CMS of choice) and marketing (to make sure people know about all of Drupal’s greatness).

Morgan Strong, ArtSEEker: using headless Drupal to power AI art recognition

Phillipa: Morgan works in digital transformation at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). Working with headless Drupal 10 and fast.ai he built a new tool for gallery patrons to interact with the art. From the app, users get the artwork in their camera frame and the app recognises the work and gives the user more information about the piece.

Josh Fisher, Azure DevOps for Drupal

Suchi: Hasitha and Josh talked about how Boroondara Council is using Azure for its Drupal website. They talked about why they went with Azure, and the challenges they faced. The presentation included a quick demo, explaining the flow including continuous integration. The dashboard was a really interesting feature.

Mike Richardson, Dries Buytaert, Tim Doyle and Owen Lansbury: A Q&A with Drupal Association leadership

Phillipa: This was a really interesting Q&A! Questions covered a range of topics, from strategic direction (a little bit of crossover with Dries’ keynote) to the presence of Drupal in markets outside of Europe and the US and how we could get ‘new (young) blood’ into Drupal.

Jibran Ijaz, To be or not to be a Technical Lead

Paul: Interesting presentation on the path to being a tech lead. Typical journey is from a developer to senior developer. Traits of good developers lead to traits of a good tech lead. Also focus on increased responsibilities and scope of influence, bigger-picture thinking and level of context switching. Jibran gave his idea of pathways beyond a TL too.

Sean Hamlin, Drupal and the Open Web in the Australian Government - 2024 edition

Toby: Was great to see that Drupal market share has increased overall since 2022 (when Sean did similar stats for DrupalSouth Brisbane), and especially in the Federal Government with 43% of federal sites on Drupal.

Phillipa: The stats showed that the Federal Government is leading the Drupal charge with NSW and Victoria close on its heels. Also some very funny insights from Sean!

Amber Henry and Matt Common, You need this when? Using a design system to achieve success

Paul: Interesting talk on the challenges of delivering the National Office of Child Safety website to a three-week, non-movable timeline dictated by a campaign based on a ministerial promise. An existing design system was used as a foundation, and user testing, IA, and design were all completed in the timeframe. The project is a success story for rapid delivery, which would not be possible without a design system.

Roman Barbun, Site360: Under the hood of a website health metrics tool

Phillipa: Roman combined humour and technical details to great effect! He took the audience through the problem space (tools that measure metrics are NOT consolidated and often website health is done as a ‘once-off’) and discussed the Site360 metrics of security, performance (speed), accessibility, SEO and patching. He included a live demo and a full architectural diagram that was re-imagined as a PacMan animation!

Steve Worley, Secure, performant, scalable and green: the big wins of a static Drupal website

Phillipa: Steve covered the benefits of static, use-cases and tools to deliver a static site. Benefits included a faster and more secure site, with less environmental impact and reduced costs. Potential use-cases covered areas like static sites as a backup that shows point-in-time data and disaster recovery (switch to the static site if the ‘normal’ site goes down). Different solutions were explored, including QuantCDN, which does crawling, static site generation and hosting in one.

Guy Frawley and William O'Keefe, Beyond the code: building mutually beneficial client relationships

Paul: Engaging talk that associated great service in the hospitality industry (the background of one of the presenters) to exemplar service delivery. Also associated emergency crash investigation (the other presenter's background) with service delivery. One powerful theme both for hospitality, or any service experience, was being remembered for "how the experience made you feel".

Joshua Li, Diving into website performance: a journey from browser to web server

Ming: Josh went through the various types of caching systems in Drupal and how to effectively manage them.

Phillipa: The presentation included great, easy-to-follow architecture/flow drawings that showed the use of a CDN and Varnish.

The Splash Awards

Day 2 finished with the Splash Awards. Winners were:

• Corporate: Sparks Interactive for subaru.co.nz

• Design/UX: Icon for space.gov.au

• Government - federal: Morpht for childsafety.gov.au/

• Government - state/local: Sitback Solutions for sydneyoperahouse.com

• Open source: Tomato Elephant Studio for Bootstrap5

• Overall winner: Morpht for childsafety.gov.au/

Salsa was thrilled to receive four nominations and also runner-up in Government-state/local for wa.gov.au.