Insightful stories that revolve around technology, culture, and design

Autumn is here! One of the things we’re looking forward to this month is DrupalCon Amsterdam from the 28th - 31st Oct 2019. Autumn is the most magical time to visit Amsterdam! An opportunity to mingle with the Drupal community in Amsterdam, what else could a Drupaler wish for? 

QED42’s support for the Drupal Community around the world is unwavering. Be it sponsoring Drupal Camps, DrupalCons, organizing Drupal meetups, or contributing to Drupal.org. 

And we hope you will join us at DrupalCon Amsterdam, this month! 

Meet us!

QED42 is proud to be a Silver sponsor this year. If you are a Drupaler you wouldn’t miss visiting QED42’s booth. We are known for our exuberant booth vibes, designs, activities, and goodies. It is our tradition of unveiling a new Drupal t-shirt design at every DrupalCon. Check out the story behind our Hindi Drupal t-shirt series here - /insights/coe/design/story-behind-our-hindi-drupal-t-shirt. Our Drupal t-shirt design for #DCA is inspired by the vibrant and spirited culture of Amsterdam. Accompanied by a couple more goodies that you will absolutely adore! 

This year, QED42 will be showcasing a wide range of our capabilities including:

• Decoupled Drupal
• Gatsby e-commerce demos
• Use cases around Drupal, JavaScript, and Design!

Come say Hi to our team at DrupalCon Amsterdam Booth No - 16, we would love to discuss ideas around how Drupal meets the ever-changing needs of the digital world.

Sessions

Our Drupal experts are presenting at DrupalCon Amsterdam 2019. You can find us at these sessions:

Houdini - New Era of CSS 

• Date: 28th Oct 2019
• Time: 15:00 - 15:40
• Location: G 103
• Track: Drupal + Frontend
• Level: Intermediate 
• Speakers: Vidit Anjaria and Saket Kumar

Here’s a sneak peek of our session - /insights/coe/javascript/building-powerful-custom-properties-css-houdini

Designing the future of the Drupal Admin UI

• Date: 30 Oct 2019
• Time: 09:00 - 09:40
• Location: G 103
• Track: Drupal + Frontend
• Level: Beginner 
• Speakers: Archita Arora, Sacha Eggenberger, and Cristina Chumillas

Keynotes

There are some exciting keynotes lined up for you at DrupalCon Amsterdam! 

- Tuesday, October 29 at 9:00 AM | Talk: Driesnote

Speaker: Dries Buytaert - Founder

- Wednesday, October 30 at 1:30 PM | Talk: If I can do it, so can you

Speaker: Sue Black - Professor of Computer Science and Technology Evangelist, UK Government Strategic Advisor, Women’s Equality Party candidate for London Mayor 2020, Professional Speaker, Author

- Tuesday, October 29 at 1:30 PM | Talk: Humanity in tech 

Speaker:  Boris Veldhuijzen Van Zanten - CEO and Co-founder of thenextweb.com

- Monday, October 28 at 1:30 PM | Talk: Drupal core initiative leads keynote

Conclusion

Attending DrupalCon Amsterdam? Don’t forget to flash your badge and spread the word - https://events.drupal.org/amsterdam2019/spread-word. Follow @DrupalConEur for recent updates around the event.

Drop by our Booth 16 and meet the QED42 team! We would love to share our exciting projects and learn more about your experiences and challenges with Drupal.

Recording my experiences of Drupal Camp Pune before they fade away. If you are connected with me on twitter, you must have seen a spike in my tweets over the weekend of 14th-15th September 2019. 

I was privileged to attend this 2-day event and want to admit that my experience of co-presenting a workshop, attending several amazing sessions, meeting old friends and new was great. Had the chance to meet a lot of people from the Drupal community, who were earlier only familiar to me via their usernames. The diversity of the sessions was really impressive. #DCP19 contained sessions for Backend, Frontend Devs, Quality Analysts, Managers, Students, Community, etc. ranging from Beginners to Experts levels.

Being a co-organizer of a Drupal event earlier, I knew how important it was to get the audience on the day of the event. The attendance was more than what was expected for both the days. This was a good sign for the event organizers.

Keynote

Undoubtedly, the star of the event was none other than Mr. Preston So. It was great to interact with him. I had initially expected his keynote to be around Gatsby. Instead, his topic was a broader one, he highlighted the transition from Content Management systems to Content Management Stack.

 He also showed how modern applications are being developed and the role of Drupal & Gatsby in it. His keynote sparked a thought in my head around how applications can be developed and what is the way forward. I would like to share a couple of non-technical highlights of his prenote:

• Preston started his keynote in Hindi and everyone in the auditorium was in awe. He truly is a master of languages.
• He gave references to the Bollywood movie “Sui Dhaaga” for explaining the challenges developers face in our day-to-day lives.
• He gave away 2 copies of his book “Decoupled Drupal in practice”.
• Preston also shared his love for India, especially Mumbai.

Post the Keynote, Preston was surrounded by people and he was busy answering dozens of questions (I was a part of that group). Questions ranged from technical aspects of Drupal, Gatsby, to him learning so many languages, etc.

Drupal India Association

 The Drupal India Association board members addressed the audience, where they showcased brand new the DIA logo designed by QED42’s design team! For more updates around DIA follow their twitter handle - @india_drupal

Drupal in a Day

A massive part of my role at #DCP19 was to co-present a 5 hour  “Drupal in a Day” workshop for the students. I co-presented with Nitesh Sethia & Meena Bisht, training and educating students who hadn’t heard of Drupal, around concepts like Opensource, Drupal, community, etc. Students gained hands-on experience with Drupal through:  

• Familiarization of Drupal concepts 
• Installing all prerequisites and Drupal itself
• Introduction to the basic building blocks of Drupal like Content Types, Fields, Blocks, Menus, Views, etc.

We also spoke about the Drupal Campus Ambassador Programme which aims to bridge the gap between students and the Industry.

 One of my favourite moments from the workshop was the attendee’s reactions when they witnessed the power of Views. They were amazed at how Views can be used to fetch data we want from the database and display it according to our needs. The responses and students eagerness to learn more new topics was a really satisfying experience.

Sponsors

Sponsors are one of the building blocks in making DrupalCamps successful! This year we had 6 sponsors. 

 QED42 was the platinum sponsor for DrupalCamp Pune 2019. We were not only the sponsors but were also the organizers for the event. QED42’s booth, vibrant standees, Quizzes around Drupal, JavaScript, Machine Learning, and Hackathon appealed to the students and event attendees. We also carried out an internship drive for students. QED42 is known in the Drupal community for its designs and goodies, this year we had T-shirts, stickers, notepads, and designed quiz cards as giveaways.  

After-Party!

Day one was tiring and about to get over, and we received an update regarding the After-party from the @drupalcamppune twitter handle!  

The after-party was one of the memorable moments of #DCP19 wherein I had numerous great conversations. I met a lot of people informally and got to know the jolly side of their life. I was so engaged in the conversations that I totally missed the dance floor. We reminisced memories from our past Drupal events, the current event and discussed future events too. Sharing a few snaps from the party at the end of this blog. Since I was caught up with “Drupal in a Day” workshop on the first day, I missed most of the sessions presented on that day. You can find out more about the sessions here - http://camp2019.drupalpune.com/accepted-sessions. However, I was lucky to attend sessions on the second day. Here are some sessions I loved: 

1. Multi-turn conversations with Alexa” — Anand Toshniwal

 The demo amazed the audience and received loud applause. Anand had set up a Drupal e-commerce store and he showcased how he could place an order with Alexa via a Multi-turn dialog. PS: Reach out to me for the recorded video of the demo! 

2. “Pixel Perfect Web” — Kiran Kadam

 Filled with Frontend enthusiasts, Kiran Kadam spoke passionately about what pixel-perfect web is and how to achieve it. 

3. “Effective storytelling with Clients and Teams” — Nikhil Anant

 Nikhil shared his experience of visiting Manali and the challenges it brought with it, describing how things can be explained in the form of stories for effective team communication.

4. “Making Front-end Testing Easier using Visual Regression” — Ambuj Gupta and Kanchan Patil

 Automation is my favorite part in Quality Assurance process, and these guys took it to the next level. 

5. Good UX = Accessible UI design - Nikita Aswani and Asmita Wagh

 The best thing about the session was the fact that not only QAs but also Developers who were equally interested in implementing A11Y and considered it to be an inseparable part of their web-development practices. 

DrupalCamp Pune Closing Session

Overall, it was a great event put up by the organizers of #DCP19. The closing session was hosted by Sushyl & Ajit, where we acknowledged the organizing team’s efforts and thanked them for making DrupalCamp Pune a huge success. Right from the swag-kits, keynotes, sessions, speakers, venue, food, after-party, and countless important items, the organizers deserve a huge round of applause. 

Next year, I am looking forward to being a part of the organizing team and experience the excitement of planning DrupalCamp Pune! 

I have collected some pictures from the event and would like to share them with you. 

Conclusion

I really appreciate and thank you for taking out time for reading this post. Hope we cross paths at the next Drupal event. #DrupalThanks

Attended my first ever JAMStack conf in London last week and there is a lot I can’t wait to share. For those who are wondering what JAMStack is, it's a modern architecture for building fast, secure, and dynamic apps with JavaScript, APIs, and pre-rendered Markup, servers without web servers. For more Why and Hows, refer https://jamstack.org/.

The event was JAM-packed with designers, front-end developers, and experts around the JAMStack domain. All conversations were majorly focused on static-site generators and going serverless - how it impacts performance, cost, and business by reducing the infrastructure cost by a great deal. A great venue and welcoming people from the community, made my first experience at JAMStack conf comfortable and enthusiastic.

This being my first-ever JAMStack conf, my focus was more on interacting with people, and getting to know what are the best practices followed across the globe. Coming from Drupal background, it was pretty interesting to see how everyone is using the features of CMS and at the same time leveraging JAMStack for the end-user-facing sites. An amazing time at the conf with a pool of friendly and enthusiastic people, discussing ideas and their pain points.

Key Takeaways:

Sarah Drasner, Netlify: State of the JAMstack Nation

Sarah talked about how JAMStack changes the way we have been traditionally thinking about web apps, servers, infra, and scalability required to handle huge traffic. The talk was followed with a very convincing demo of an e-commerce site hosted statically on Netlify, built using Nuxt with Stripe integration and Lambda functions for functional points. Code reference link: https://github.com/sdras/ecommerce-netlify

Lightning Talks:

Matt Biilmann, Netlify: Netlify pushes analytics tracking live

Nelify CEO Matt Biilmann deployed analytics live tracking with Netlify during the event. This enables faster and more accurate statistics - https://twitter.com/paulmaunders/status/1148896750561873920

Knut Melvær, SanityCMS: Transforming the Json - GROQ (and Sanity CMS)

Previously available within Sanity CMS, GROQ is now open-source. The talk showcased advantages over GraphQL. A detailed article on Sanity CMS Blog - https://www.sanity.io/blog/we-re-open-sourcing-groq-a-query-language-for-json-documents

Ben Edwards, Stack bit

Ben showcased an interesting way of building JAMstack websites in minutes by combining themes, site-generators, and CMS without complex integrations. The project would generate a YML config file which will be processed by an adapter for the CMS(if supported). The adapter also covers REST APIs for the CMS. 

Ives van Hoorne, CodeSandbox: Making development more visual

Shared the story of how he started with expensive servers during his college days and scaled things better by using JAMStack. How they moved from 10 users with hosting cost of 100$/month to 100K users with 100$/month. The story highlighted the speed, cost, scalability, and most importantly the offline capabilities. 

Vitaly Friedman, Smashing Magazine: Smashing Magazine’s story around moving to JAMStack

With ad-blockers disrupting their business model, they decided on a new model of paid membership. The shift was a complete UX overhaul and the transition also included moving to JAMStack. In turn, the performance peaked at to load time of 1s on slower internet connections. Smashing Magazine is hosted now on Netlify and uses markdown files in Github.

Ramin Bozorgzadeh, WeWork: WeWork’s Journey to JAMstack

Ramin shared his experience around WeWork running on monoliths earlier. Which meant that if one system went down, all would. He also explained how moving to JAMStack not just allowed them to have micro-apps, but at the same time improve performance in all aspects that Google lighthouse performs checks on. Performance is directly proportional to their lead conversions was showcased via A/B tests. 

Ramin also talked about their stack being based on Gatsby and how the live preview plugin helps them to preview the content before taking it live.

He concluded the talk with better sleep and vacations after the switch.

Una Kravets, Google: CSS Houdini Today

Things went to the next level and probably the most astonishing talk for me was when Una Kravets displayed the new CSS spec, Houdini. “You can write JS in CSS” - something that blew my mind.

Una talked about low-level browser APIs similar to service workers for CSS. A couple of cool demonstrations around the paint API followed, which seemed pretty impossible with CSS earlier. The talk concluded with a small library demo using features from Houdini built using Gatsby and hosted on Netlify.

Simona Cotin, Microsoft: Serverless can do that?!

Simona showcased the capabilities of Serverless in her talk. The talk revolved around evolution from web-servers to serverless: with initial servers in facilities, then in VPS and now we don’t need to manage anything. Just write our functions and the service takes care of the rest. With pay-per-use, the cost reduces immensely now, given that we are not paying for the entire web server now. This makes computing super cheap. Simona exemplified it with the use case of Squarespace where they needed 20k for 2 servers initially and still were not able to cater to huge traffic. Today, with a shift to serverless, the same cost would serve the traffic of almost 1 million requests for free, 2 million would cost ~5$ a month which is equivalent to a Starbucks coffee.

The talk answered What, Why, and How around serverless with really good and real examples.

Jake Archibald and Surma: Google Setting up a static render in 30 mins.

Jake Archibald and Surma rocked the stage with an interesting demo around reducing the TTI for an application from ~12s to 2s. The application demo involved optimizing an app similar to Minesweeper under 2G and 3G network loads. They explained how simple and important it is to write a plugin in Rollup, rather than relying on huge plugins, in cases where you don’t need a lot of features from those plugins. Optimizations during the demo included the following:

• Load visible elements first and things like animations could be loaded later making sure users don’t see a blank screen for a very long time.
• Made use of Preact which is a much smaller library compared to React.
• Optimize web font size by using google web fonts and trim their size down by only including the characters needed by the app. This trick helps reduce font-file size from 10 kb to a few bytes: https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Literata&text=ABCD
• Multiple gzip compressions. Use Brotli as compression in place of gzip.

Code for the app is available here: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/proxx  

Conclusion

Thanks to the amazing organizing team who put together the event and the sponsors for making this event successful. Overall the event was a great learning activity for me. Meeting people and hearing from them about practices and tools used while going serverless, building rich static websites. Many experiences were gathered which I would like to take back to implementation now. Facing a problem and want to discuss why/why not around static site generators?  Feel free to drop in a comment below.

QED42 has always been an ardent participant in the Drupal community. We pride ourselves for contributing to the Drupal community via modules, code patches, Drupal initiatives, DrupalCons, DrupalCamps or hosting Meetups!

Drupal Meetups play an integral role in fostering community. Dries Buytaert was quoted on Drupal.org’s getting involved page:

It’s really the Drupal community and not so much the software that makes the Drupal project what it is. So fostering the Drupal community is actually more important than just managing the code base.

We hosted the Pune Drupal Group monthly meetup on 18th May 2019 at our office. The healthy turnout to the local meetup was a reflection of how connected the Pune Drupal Community was.

Packed with people, plenty of snacks, and laptops our Meetup commenced. After a brief introduction from all the attendees, the lights dimmed and Meena Bisht from QED42 started her session ‘ Be Ready for Drupal 9!’

It was a highly interactive session that pivoted around Drupal’s ever-evolving nature. She spoke about how long Drupal 7 will be supported, Drupal 8 end of life, and how it would impact businesses. Drupal 8.7 features - Layout Builder and Media Library and challenges faced while moving from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.

We welcomed the newest member to the family, Drupal 9.

The session also covered the Drupal release cycle, which justified the difficulties faced while moving to Drupal 8. We were relieved to know that upgrading to Drupal 9 would be a lot easier thanks to the minor upgrades.

The session shed light on why an upgrade is required, and what to expect out of Drupal 9. We ended the session with useful tips on tools for checking our deprecated code while preparing for Drupal 9.

Post session, we discussed the hurdles faced during the earlier version releases, our inhibitions, and expectations from Drupal 9.

After a quick break with refreshments and offline chats, we gathered back for the BoF session on the configuration management system. We discussed the origin of configuration management, as a Drupal initiative, the different configuration issues faced by us and identified solutions.

Lastly, we chalked out a map for the DrupalCamp Pune. All the attendees brought helpful ideas to the table, location, sessions, sponsorships, etc.

After an informative and super lucrative agenda of sessions, BoF, and DrupalCamp Pune planning, we wrapped up our Meetup.

Last month, Pune Drupal community conducted a Global Training Day event. It was a successful event and saw huge participation from Pune Drupal community.
Pune GTD reminded us that community is what makes Drupal so special and that interaction between the community members was somewhat missing from our Drupal life.

With the hope that we can change this, we had planned to increase the community participation by bringing back our monthly Drupal meetups.
And we did deliver on our plan! We had our first Drupal meetup of the year on Saurday, 12th Jan at SISCR, Pune.

The day started with a session on 'Docksal for Drupal' by Sharique.

The session covered the basics of containers and the difference between virtualization and containarization followed by a detailed demo of setting up a Drupal instance using Docksal and managing various configurations for Docksal.
Overall, this was a great introduction for developers & teams trying to adopt Docksal for their development environment.

Highlight of the day was the next session on the topic of Accessibility presented by Nikita, Ambuj & Sonal.

Nikita started the session by explaning basic concepts of Accessibility and day-to-day programming tips & tricks developers/teams can follow to make their site accessible.

It was followed by Ambuj's explanation of QA's perspective on Accessibility and what should be expected by users & testers for an accessible site.

Sonal concluded the session by going into the implementation details, specially the easy ways a developer/team can make their site accessible.

We ended the day having by a general BoF on 'How to increase the community participation for Drupal meetups'.
This was a very productive discussion and the community identified the challenges of setting up a quality event and came up with action items for them.

• Attendees want to see a variety of topics instead of just having them limited to Drupal Backend and Custom Module development. The session on Accessibility was much liked by the community and they'd love to see more such topics.
• There's a need to streamline and improve the process of communicating Drupal events and their reporting.

We promise to work on the above and would love to see many of you join us in future meetups. Stay tuned to community updates for information on future events and topics!

Links to Session slides/resources:
1. Docksal: https://www.slideshare.net/safknw/local-drupal-development-using-docksal
2. Web Accessibility: https://bit.ly/2Dgw5P9

The calls for sessions for DrupalCon Vienna had just closed and all of us who had submitted their sessions were waiting, eager to find out about the result. It was just a usual day at the office and I get an email from the Drupal Association. I opened the mail and what I saw wanted to make me jump out of my chair! Yes, my selection for DrupalCon was confirmed and I was so excited! It was an unbelievable situation for me because it was quite unexpected, not that I was under confident about myself but to be a young member in the Drupal Community, and getting selected amongst so many talented and experienced people out there, is sure to make anyone feel surprised. With only an experience of 1.5 years of working with QED42 as a user experience designer, this seemed like a dream come true for me.

I’ve spoken publicly before, mostly in the context of design, but preparing for a Drupal conference was a whole new affair for me.

My excitement had not ceased but there was a slight fear building up, of talking in one of the biggest conferences. I had to prepare myself to speak in front of an audience that had a lot more experience in Drupal than I had.

Being a young designer, the whole idea of my talk was to put forward a fresh perspective on designing for Drupal.

I positively had a feeling that the selection of my session happened to get a fresh point of view from a person who was new to the Drupal community and as a designer could help contribute to bring a positive change to the Drupal world.

I wanted to put forward the smallest of the details of my experience - in a manner that could successfully communicate my opinions to the versatile audience - which could be anyone from a developer to a project manager.

I wrote down my thoughts and insights I encountered during the process of creating my slides. While preparing for the talk I realised that I had gained a good amount of information which would help me further in presenting my topic.    

Understanding the main themes of the conference helped me shape the focus of my talk. Speaking for the first time in front of a technical audience at a conference can be intimidating where some audience members may have more knowledge than you about your subject. Preparation is crucial. I was also getting a helpful feedback while preparing, particularly about expanding the content to make it more relevant.

I had prepared myself for the best and the worst. It was about time that I began my presentation. The first few minutes of the talk were the toughest but as I went on sharing my knowledge I became less anxious. I realised that speaking at a conference is a great way to share knowledge and experience and it is quite surprising to see how much we can learn when researching our talk topics. It’s also a great opportunity to network with other professionals in our field, and make some great new friends.

It was a great relief to know that I did not screw up as bad as I thought I might, and maybe my talk helped someone. It was also very rewarding to get feedback from the audience and hear their thoughts on what they had to say.

The entire presentation felt like an out of body experience to me. It took a lot of time and effort to prepare and speak at this conference but it was worth it. And it is good to know that I’m a part of Drupal and I’m being able to participate in whatever way I can, to add to this amazing community.

Travelling alone this far, for the first time, I was scared. But knowing that I am a part of the Drupal community and connected to everybody around me through Drupal gave me a sense of belonging and lifted up my spirits. To my surprise I wasn’t feeling out of place because it felt like a family, our own Drupal family where our collective aim is to work for the betterment and growth of this community. My excitement was at it’s peak till the closing ceremony. And I’m now looking forward to more such opportunities to speak and share stories.

36 days of type is a project challenging visual artists to create a letter or number a day for 36 days, exploring different media and pushing the boundaries of creative expression. It also marks a great time for illustrators, typographers, and graphic designers to experiment with their craft and it also provides a platform to make a statement with one’s work.

This was our first time participating in the worldwide phenomenon of #36DaysOfType2017 - fourth edition, and we were more than excited to take up this challenge! Since it is an open challenge and the amount of experiment that we could do was infinite, it took some time to decide the theme that we would be choosing. We wanted to give this project an illustrative spin and also wanted to showcase India’s cultural extravaganza. That’s how we decided to illustrate the performing arts of India through letters and numbers. These performing arts include dance, music, theatre and martial arts practiced in all the states of India.

This series is meant to highlight India and the diverse manifestations of India’s cultural beauty. It also aims to identify even the art forms that many people are not aware of or the dying art forms of our country. The letters have been directly or indirectly represented as a form of dance, music, theatre or martial arts while the numbers have been represented as Indian classical musical instruments.

Why we took this challenge

We’ve been asked a few times - what was the reason behind taking up the 36 days of type challenge? Well, to describe it in a sentence, creative expression knows no bounds and we should not let any opportunity slip away that lets this creative energy expand.

However, we had more reasons to participate in this challenge. It requires everyone who is participating, to post something everyday. This helps us to be pragmatic, sensitive to time and maintain a design discipline. It is a challenge to express our creative thoughts being within certain limitations. Letters and numbers have a predefined structure and form, which defines a boundary of expression. Thus, this challenge is a great way to express with shapes, forms and constitutional limitations.

Since, we were showcasing performing arts of India, all the characters required extraordinary amount but time bound research which made us better in researching about a topic in a short span of time. All the ideas that we build in our head might go to waste if they are not transformed into a tangible form.

And in order to do so, we must present these ideas properly for the world to see our perspective. Attention to details is a concept well understood in design community but often overlooked and our objective is to strike a balance between the ideas and details.

Our experience

The development of this series involved an intensive research about the various performing art forms, studying their aspects and brainstorming sketches for the same. Some days we were successful in creating a great blend between letter form and the art form, others were a struggle, but we racked our talented brains until we were happy with our design.

We had a lot of fun playing around with the letters and numbers. We would give and take feedback from each other too, and learned a lot of new things in the process. Some of our favourite letters from the series are ‘B’ (Baul folk music from West Bengal), ‘K’ (Kathputli from Rajasthan), ’T’ (Theyyam, a colourful ritual dance of Kerala).

We enjoyed every minute of the journey and looking forward to doing it again!

Drupal India Community have been talking about Pan India code sprint and with effort and cooperation of regional communities we were finally able to organise a combined sprint, we had participation from Mumbai, Jaipur, Delhi and Pune. This is an account of Pune sprint which happened at QED42 Office in Viman Nagar. We had a total attendance of 10 Drupalers out of which 2 were first time sprinters ( Congratulations Dhruvesh and Shreyal on attending your first sprint :) ).

The focus of the sprint was porting modules from D7 to D8 and trying to reach stable releases of some of the modules that were started in previous sprints. One of those modules was auto_entitylabel the issues were triaged prior to the code sprint, so we had less trouble getting around the issues & fixing them up. EOD, we were able to get a basic version of the module, which included integration with tokens. 

Ajit mentored Dhruvesh on autologout tasks and Dhruvesh contributed a fix to an issue in D8 version of the module & then backported it to Drupal 7 version as well.

Sprint also included some code review work around heap_analytics module, which Nitesh  ported to Drupal 8 (https://github.com/nitesh11/heap_analytics). 

‍

Overall, it was a productive sprint & we plan to continue the same on Last Saturday of every Month. Keep an eye on auto_entitylabel, jquery_carousel, heap_analytics if you are interested to use them in Drupal 8, couple of sprints and help from community we should be able to release stable versions of these modules :) we specifically need help on testing of these modules and reporting issues.

The flavour of this month has been the Drupalcon New Orleans and we decided to keep the momentum going for this PDG meet-up held at the QED42 office.

The first session was given by Rakhi Mandhania on her experience at DrupalCon both as an attendee as well as a Keynote speaker for the Higher Ed Summit. She explained how everyone is concerned with the migration of a large number of websites to Drupal 8 and the lack of rich Drupal talent. DrupalCAP initiative was hailed as a solution to the jarring lack of Drupal literate work force and appreciated all around.

The second session was by Piyuesh Kumar on service workers, the same session both he and Saket kumar presented at New Orleans. He explained that functionalities such as, rich offline experiences, periodic background syncs, push notifications that traditionally require a native application are coming to the web and service workers provides the technical foundation all these features will rely on.

He ended the session with a demo of a working website for DrupalCamp.

The evening was concluded with us deciding the dates for DrupalCamp Pune 2016, which will tentatively take place sometime in late August.

Watch this space for details, coming shortly!
Good day and see you all soon.

The monthly Pune Drupal Group Meetup for April was hosted by QED42. The second PDG meetup to take place in the month of April, You would assume meeting this often would get tiring for other people but not us! We Drupalers love a good catchup session.

The first session was kicked off by Prashant and Rahul, Interns at QED42 and they spoke on, "Our experience with Drupal." They explained about their journey as new comers to Drupal, from the lenses of both CMS and the community. Their confusion at the beginning, the new tech and softwares they have learned, their experience at Drupalcon Asia and their love for the community. A really enjoyable session peppered with ernest observations and cute cat pictures and a brilliant first time attempt. Bravo boys!

The second session was taken by Arjun Kumar of QED42 on,"Introduction to CMI." With a brief on CMI and the difference from the features land, he concluded with a demo.

After a short discussion on the probable date and location for Pune Drupal Camp we broke off for BOF sessions,with Navneet leading the discussion on Acquia certifications and further discussions on CMI.

With 20 people in attendence we concluded the PDG april meetup with delicious Pahadi Sandwiches in our tummy. Have a great weekend and see you soon!

The monthly meet-up for March was moved from the last friday of the month, which was the good Friday, to the 1st of April and hoped really hard that people didn't think it was an April fools prank. This PDG meetup was hosted by Rotary International thanks to diligence of Dipak Yadav who works there. It is always fun when the meetup is hosted in different locations because we get to explore different parts of Pune and see new faces.

With 25 members in attendence, the meetup was kicked off by Dipak giving us an informative talk about Rotary International and the work they do.

The speaker for the evening was Sushil Hanwate of Axelerant and he spoke on,“ Services and dependency injections in Drupal 8.”

The session ended after a short Q&A, we broke off into smaller groups for BOF sessions. Saket headed the BOF for Service workers and the second group discussed about the Drupal 8 Module development.

Once we were done with technical talks, we were served one of the best Kachoris we have tasted :). While we happily munched on the snacks, we decided on the preliminary team members for the upcoming Pune Drupal Camp.

Though the meetups are being held regularly we still need to figure a way of involving newer members into the community and one of the way that is possible is if we get more people volunteering to host the meetups. Kudos to Rotary for hosting us, if you are a Pune based company / group who would like to host the next meetup then please get in touch via comments. 

Our next PDG meetup is scheduled for the 29th of April. Along with a session on,"Experience with Drupal" by Rahul Savaria and Prashant Kumar from QED42, we shall also be planning and discussing further about the upcoming Pune Drupal Camp.
Dont forget to RSVP, See you soon!

With around 767 submissions from around the globe DrupalCon New Orleans must have set a new record for an all time high for session submissions at any conference. We can only imagine the plight of track chairs who helped select final ~150 sessions, given the numbers we are absolutely thrilled to announce that three of our talks (Including one in higher ed summit) have been accepted for Drupalcon New Orleans.

Here is a brief of talks at Drupalcon New Orleans May, 2016.

Service Workers Internals:

Saket and Piyuesh will talk about Service Workers on D8 and the promise of offline web. The topic is a build up from series of BoF at Drupalcon Asia where service workers was discussed passionately and pragmatically. It’s not just frontend, necessary backend infrastructure (route caching, url config) needs to be present for service workers to be a reality, hence Saket and Piyuesh ( our frontend and backend leads ) decided to team up on this. You can read more about the tentative agenda at the session synopsis and here are rumours of what to expect in the demo:

• Config for urls for offline first approach
• Config for urls for network first approach & fallback to serviceworker cache
• Static resource caching via service workers
• Since D8 has placeholders, it would be wise to cache the response of placeholders & render them using service-workers. Background sync can be used to keep pulling in fresh data for the placeholders.

Exploring Drupal 8 Frontend landscape through Polymer :

Saket is back with a session on the utopia of using Drupal 8 as a backend for multiple front end frameworks; this time it’s through Polymer. Webcomponents have had the frontend community wanting, what’s not to desire? Reusable components, shadow DOM, templating and much more all native to the browser. Though webcomponents paints a beautiful feature, Polymer from Google delivers it as a polyfill for the restless. In this talk Saket will talk about what Drupal 8 frontend programming might look like and glitches we might need to resolve for a smooth future.

Higher-ed Summit

Drupal Campus Ambassador Program - A community Initiative:

A wildcard entry into Dries’s keynote and Holly’s closing-note at Drupalcon Asia,  DCAP made its humble beginnings in one of India’s regional events, where business folks were trying to find answers to Drupal talent problems. In spirit of Drupal community’s do-ocracy some of the community members figured a WIN-WIN solution for the problem, that is to take Drupal to colleges and evangelise it professionally. There have been numerous college workshops but DCAP is different in ways that it provides longevity and support to college students and that is exactly what Rakhi will be sharing at Higher-ed summit -- a bit of the history, successes so far and brave new world Drupal will foray into through DCAP. Catch Rakhi in action on May 9 at DrupalCon New Orleans.

To say that we are excited for Drupalcon Asia would be an understatement. With 36 of QED42 team in attendance, there is nothing we at QED42 love more than a congregation of Drupal lovers and Drupal enthusiasts from all over the world under one roof. We have been busy as elves trying to make it as much fun as possible for everyone (and us).
 

QED42 Sessions at Drupalcons

Art of Debugging and optimising Front End using Chrome Dev Tools: If you have always wanted to know tips,tricks and pointers on front end debugging and optimisation our QED42 guys, Swastik and Saket have you covered. Catch their talk on 02/19/2016 at 16:00 in hall 31, Drupalcon Asia.

Outsource! Really difficult to do it, eh?: Taking her experience as a Project Manager here at QED42, Rakhi Mandhania is giving a talk on outsourcing projects and how to optimize the process. Catch her in action at Drupalcon Asia, on 02/20/2016 from16:00-17:00 in hall 21.

BOFS Proposed by QED42

Bigpipe in Drupal 8: A Birds of a feather by Piyuesh where he will be discussing in detail about pipelining page components with the new Bagpipe Module, including code walk throughs. Take part in it at DrupalCon Asia at 12:45pm-13:45pm on Feb 19, 2016, Seminar Room 12.

Exploring Drupal 8 Frontend landscape through Polymer: Saket is back with a BOF session on the promise of using Drupal 8 as a backend for multiple front end frameworks.He will be concentrating on both about Drupal 8 Front end improvements and web components / Polymer. Come along and volley ideas to and fro with Saket at Drupalcon Asia on Feb 20 at from16:00 to17:00 in Seminar Room 13.

All work and no play makes for a dull Druplar, so come by Booth 11 for some fun activities.

See you soon!

This quarter's Drupal Global Training Day happened on 23rd May 2015. In association with the pune drupal community a two day workshop was conducted in Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies & Research. The workshop was a two days program held on 23rd May 2015 and 24th May 2015 which focused on giving practical sessions on views basics, advanced views, basic Drupal theming and module development. Ajit Shinde and Saheel Sikilkar took the sessions on views along with few team members to mentor the students.

In the session students were made to build there own job portal. Throughout the training practical sessions was focused on along with making flowcharts to make understanding easier.Students were keen to get their doubts cleared, this kept the session interactive.

On the second day training moved to front end on Drupal, The workshop was taken up by Saket Kumar and Swastik Pareek, along with other members of Pune community helping in the lab with student doubts and queries, the workshop focussed on basic front end workflow for Drupal and also delved into custom theme development from scratch.

Students were shown how to design a page using the psd designs and were given task to design their homepage for job portal which they built, the previous day. Basic module development was discussed by Dinu Mishra from the Pune community and went on to cover basic building blocks of a custom module. With that we wrapped up 2 days of engaging workshops with future Drupalers.

Few lines shared by students on the workshop:

""The sessions were quite good enough to let us understand the system from the basics. I learned many new things which I was supposed to learn. Without asking questions to them many of my confusions were cleared. Doing hands on one by one was a good technique rather than explaining everything and then doing hands on, it was a good workshop held by you guys.

-Vicky Thakkar

MSc CA, SICSR ""

""We did not have the clear idea about Drupal earlier, but the session gave us the whole idea about Drupal Development. The team which taught us Drupal was so calm and helpful, that gave a spark of interest in Drupal. 

-Dhruvesh D Tripathi

MSc CA, SICSR""

""The Drupal Workshop was an informative session where we could learn about the module and theme development and many other features which Drupal provides. There was a hands on session too that helped us to learn more about Drupal as we could practically see the outcomes.

- Surabhi Gokte

MSc CA, SICSR""

We are thankful to Clarion Technologies for hosting the Pune Drupal monthly meetup on 29th May 2015 at its premises. The meetup had more than 38 active members participating into it. In this meet up we came up with an open discussion to bring basic solutions to problems faced by the frontend and backend developers. Swastik Pareek initiated the discussion by giving a brief presentation on “Bridging the gap between themer and site builder ”. Some of the things discussed in the presentation :-

• Estimating together :-  Developer and themer should do estimations in tandem, checking feasibility and being on same page with markup consensus.
• Common Mistakes :- The very basic and the most common mistakes done while site building were pointed in this section.
• Reusable code :- If different pages have same designs then code should be written such that it could be reused, one should not write too much page specific codes.
• Image Management : Discussion on image management and image presets while theming

Followed by the presentation we had a problem solving session in which all the developer discussed about their problem faced in different areas.  Following are the area of discussions taken up :-

• Saket Kumar talked about the solutions to queries about theme development.false
• Ajit Shinde speaking about Development in Drupal8.false
• Piyuesh Kumar discussed about the Drupal site performance issues and solutions.false
• Ravish Gupta from the pune drupal group talked about multilingual sites and translations.false

After this Piyuesh Kumar shared his cool experience about @DrupalConNAfalse

He talked about the keynote given by Dries Buytaert, prenote. He and Saket Kumar shared their experiences about mentoring the code sprint in @DrupalConNA. He mentioned about Dries Buytaert doing live commit for a patch done by the group in code sprint at @DrupalConNA. In addition he talked about after parties :) and benefits of developer networking. The session was focussed on sharing experience which got many excited for DrupalCons Asia 2016 in Mumbai

Stay connected with us to get updates on Pune Drupal Group.

This month Pune Drupal group had more than 75 active attendees participating in Drupal Monthly Meetup. We are thankful to Cybage Software Pvt Ltd  for hosting the event on 26th June 2015 at their premises.

 The basic agenda of the meetup was to launch the Pune Drupal Camp 2015 website and present the camp highlights. 

Ajit Shinde presented a session on drush which mostly focussed on drush as a deployment and remote management tool in detail. In the presentation he discussed various scenarios of remote server management using Drush and site aliases.

To understand this in more detail you can follow this Blog :- drush as deployment and remote management.

Shubhangi Bandal presented a session on Drupal Distributions. She talked about anatomy of distributions and how to create your own with a discussion on .make files and Installation profiles. 

After the sessions we had BoFs(Birds of Feather) where developers came together and discussed their problems in different areas of development. Following are the areas of discussions taken :-

• Saket Kumar talked about the solutions to queries about Drupal 8 theme development.

• Ajit Shinde spoke about Drupal 8 module development.
• Swastik Pareek explained about Drupal 7 Behaviours.

• Naveen Valecha stressed on Drupal performance.
• Saheel Sikilkar discussed on Drupal to Drupal Migration.

After the BoFs Dipen talked about future of Students in Drupal.

 He addressed about Drupal Campus Ambassador Program (DCAP) which aims to introduce Drupal to top Indian Universities and Engineering colleges by creating a network of Drupal Campus Ambassadors across different Universities and Engineering colleges of India. DCAP will be lead by core leadership and volunteers from the Indian Drupal community will travel to these colleges, evangelize Drupal and select one student who has very good insight into Open Source technologies. He mentioned that the idea behind the DCAP is to have these bright minds spreading Drupalism at the grass root level. At the end, community launched Pune Drupal Camp 2015 website and thanked members of the team who worked for the website.

 Stay connected with us to get updates on Pune Drupal Group.

We are thankful to the community to give us the opportunity to host the Drupal Monthly MeetUp. The Meetup was held on 31st July 2015 with the agenda to accelerate the progress of Drupal Pune Camp 2015.

The Inception of the meetup was marked by Saheel Sikilkar who gave a brief insight on the Semi Automation of Publication Process using Drupal. The talk was a sharp introspection into the challenges faced and how Drupal came across as a winner to the solution. 

This was further followed by Prafful Nagwani who discussed about the challenges faced in Project Management from developers perpective and its solutions. He quoted that ""Productivity is directly proportional to proper time management and communication between the team is a dealbreaker solution to most of the problems.""

After the sessions we had BoFs(Birds of Feather) where developers came together and discussed problems faced in different areas of development. Following are some of the areas of discussions taken :-

• Why we should use Drupal 8 ? which was reasoned by Dipen
• Saheel Sikilkar talked about Editage Insights which is built completely on the concept of Semi Automation of Publication Process.

• Sumit Madan shared his ideas for increasing Contributions to Open Source. How it could be a boon for everyone if focussed upon.

• Piyuesh Kumar posited on How one can increase Website Performance ?​

After the BoFs everyone enjoyed sharing their ideas and contributions in Pune Drupal Camp 2015 website and its promotions discussions where taken up over a cup of tea. Since Pune Drupal Camp 2015 website is built on Drupal 8 it added to the experience of everyone working on it. And with this the Drupal Monthly meetup was concluded over some Pizzas, Extra loaded with ideas that were brewed over a cup of coffee and the never ending love for Drupal.

Stay connected with us to get more updates on Pune Drupal Group.