Living Life by the Drop

Seattle loves its coffee, and so this will be a story of commiseration, sunbreaks, and hope.

One fateful Monday morning, my fancy coffee maker died and left me stranded with no caffeine! This reduced me to brewing coffee on my stove with a couple of pots, a ladle, and a vegetable strainer. However, to my benefit, I learned about the correct temperature of water, proper steep times, and pour-over methodology that gave me a new perspective on how I wanted to brew coffee for the rest of my life. This stove coffee was actually really good!

I still wanted a coffee maker; I needed this. You don’t even know. But my new found appreciation for what goes into that golden cup changed how I shopped for a new machine forever.

This experience reminded me that Drupal 8 did this for me, too. The jump from Drupal 6 and 7 to Drupal 8 was a massive change in paradigms; a new underlying framework, strange software design patterns, new ways of extending Core functionality, and bizarre new approaches to theming all required a change in how we build new Drupal projects. Similarly, just as each point release of Drupal adds new functionality, the rules for new project implementation changes again.

This session will reminisce about previous versions of Drupal 8, look at the roadmap of what’s coming with future versions, and even look ahead to the not-so-distant future of Drupal 9. It will explore how these subtle changes and big leaps should teach us to be comfortable with uncomfortable changes and anticipate that our current snug and cozy ways of doing things will one day abruptly end.

Hopefully, instead of the next release of Drupal feeling like a dark storm on the horizon, we will look at it and say, “the mountains are out!”