Session Tracks

Tracks are a collection of sessions sorted by topic which span in experience level from beginner to advanced. Sessions will range in time with a both 25-minute and 60-minute options available.

If you are interested in submitting a session proposal, please read below to determine the appropriate track and make sure to read up on what that track is looking for and tailor your submission to fit that. Please also review the Speaker Agreement before starting your submission.

Being Human

The Drupal community is diverse, colorful, interesting, open, and caring, but sometimes pessimistic, overwhelming and stressful too - we are humans after all.

We invite you to share your stories, personal experiences, and solutions, on being human.

We would like to hear:

  • your advice and knowledge on successful ways of working and collaborating with others.
  • your views on how we can provide and maintain a safe, welcoming, empowering, inclusive community for everyone.
  • experiences with mental health issues, how you support yourself, others around you, and how we can support the community at large.

Talk topic keywords:

  • Collaboration, productivity, team management, conflict, effective communication, empathy
  • Diversity, inclusion, culture, values, ethics, safe environment, community building, contribution, support, mentorship.
  • Mental health, physical health, impostor syndrome, burnout, work/life balance, failure, asking for help, fear, mindfulness, happiness, procrastination.

Business

How do we grow a sustainable Drupal business in an increasingly competitive marketplace and how can we innovate and diversify to stay ahead?

We want to inspire attendees with relevant experience, story-driven narratives, innovative ideas, and in-depth lessons learned. In order for attendees to get the most out of the sessions, please support your ideas with real life examples, hard facts and high-level numbers where possible.

Suggested topics:

  • Marketing and selling Drupal as an enterprise solution beyond GOV and NGO markets.
  • Alternative and innovative models of running and growing agency businesses.
  • Case studies on using Drupal as the technology platform for a company.

Coding and Development

This track is focused on Drupal 8 development; the workflows, tools and patterns that surround developing Drupal applications at any scale. This track is targeted to Drupal developers and those who want to become one.

Suggested topics:

  • Developing and maintaining real-life Drupal 8 projects
  • Developing distributions or re-usable feature packages
  • Exciting, interesting or challenging topics on Drupal development, e.g. API-first, console tools, migrations, etc.

Core Conversations

Core Conversations are a place for people actively working on and contributing to Drupal to meet, discuss and plan the future.

Where regular tracks and sessions focus on the present and immediate future, Core Conversations are about long term. They are not only about presenting ideas and plans but also about putting questions forward and finding answers for open questions.

Each session is a conversation. This can be two or more people giving their different ideas and opinions on an issue, or a short presentation followed by 30 minutes of discussion with the audience.

Topics could include:

  • Actionable plans for back and front end: Core initiatives and potential new core functionality
  • Drupal's ecosystem: Tools, software and support structures that we (could) rely on
  • Accessibility and usability: how to improve it on a larger scale

DevOps

DevOps operates at the intersection of development and operations. The DevOps culture is all about automating repetitive tasks, streamlining the development process and speeding up feedback loops, resulting in higher quality code and, ultimately, better products.

Suggested topics:

  • Continuous Integration / Automated Deployments / Automated Testing
  • Container infrastructures and best practices
  • How to achieve DevOps and the business value of DevOps within companies of any size.

Drupal Showcase

The Drupal Showcase track provides an in depth look into Drupal case studies from industry experts and their clients. Be inspired your peers to find new ways to push the envelope with Drupal.

Learn about solving business and technical challenges and how you can create new business opportunities directly from the people who were involved. Educate yourselves on new ways to use Drupal from Drupal evaluators and site owners, business managers, technical decision makers, and developers as they reflect on their work and share their Drupal success stories. This is a track that anyone can benefit from as a variety of topics and perspectives will be presented.

Topics you can expect

  • What was the business and technical challenge that was solved.
  • What was the Drupal solution they created to solve it.
  • What was the business impact for solving that problem with the solution.
  • What did it mean to the client to have that problem solved.
  • What lessons were learned.

Front End

The Drupal 8 front end includes a wide variety of approaches: not just Drupal theming, but headless and decoupled as well. Meanwhile, outside the Drupal world, web design and frontend development are changing at a dizzying pace in recent years.Show us what you know! What are your solutions for theming, UX and JavaScript in Drupal 8? Which trends are here to stay and will shape the future of Drupal?

Suggested topics:

  • Drupal 8 best Front end practices and tools (Javascript, libraries, theming, components, layouts…)
  • Outside the island (using Patternlab, Angular or any other technology with Drupal?)
  • UX and Drupal

Horizons

Drupal was born at time when the web was simply HTML pages served to desktop computers; in the 15 years since, technology -- and our relationship to it -- have undergone massive changes. Where does Drupal fit in a world where the web is everywhere, on every device, in every room in our house and in our vehicles? What role can we play in home automation, conversational interfaces, and ubiquitous AI?

Suggested topics:

  • Visions for Drupal - What is the future of Drupal as an end-to-end publishing solution? What does digital publishing look like in a decoupled, multi-channel world? What can Drupal deliver beyond ‘web pages’?
  • New frontiers in User Interfaces - Augmented Reality, VR, conversational interfaces, connected devices, machine learning/AI: what kind of technologies are now available, and how do they change our thinking about Drupal?
  • Innovations in Javascript, php and other web languages - Technologies that make digital experiences richer, faster, more interactive and easier to build: how can we bring the best of what’s new into the tools we know and love?

Performance and Scaling

The ability to deliver performant web applications and scale to meet customer demand is critical for better user experiences, higher conversions and ultimately, to your business’s bottom line. Share your real-world solutions for making your web application and your organization more performant and scalable.

Suggested topics:

  • Caching and global delivery strategies (e.g. CDNs, Cache Tagging, ESI)
  • Frontend and backend performance tuning and optimizations
  • Adopting new innovations and technologies (e.g. HTTP/2, Refreshless, BigPipe, Alternative frontends & interfaces)

PHP

The best Drupal developers are also great PHP developers. The PHP track focuses on PHP skills and tools like Composer, Symfony, and PHPUnit, to make your life as a Drupal developer easier than ever.

Sessions cover topics like:

  • Improve your tools: Master your IDE, develop a hundred sites at once on your laptop, and more - make coding PHP in Drupal a breeze.
  • Composer and friends: Leveraging PHP tools, libraries, standards, and best practices to get the most out of Drupal, and learn faster.
  • Tests save you time: Using PHPUnit to speed up development in Drupal… and sleep better at night.

Project Management

Project management is methodologies, tools, measurements, issue handling, client contact and constant improvement of processes to always deliver the best product - and above all, the human interaction in a technical world. The project management track is about helping each other to better set expectations, estimate, facilitate, review, report on, and strategically plan your projects and portfolios. We want to encourage sessions that will speak to project managers, product managers, scrum masters, and other project leadership roles of all levels of experience in order to share our skills and learn from one another.

Suggested topics:

  • Project management in smaller teams - What was your best experience with selecting methodology and supporting tools? Did you have to overcome handling different roles and how? How did you solve working with limited resources?
  • Project management as a communication and culture facilitator - Are you using project management to implement the company culture in the team? With the client? What are your best experiences when working on distance from other team members? How can the project manager help resolve problems?
  • Project management across team functions - Do you get everybody to dance to your tune or do different roles require different approaches? How did you create a coherency across so different roles?

Site Building

The Site Building track is about letting Drupal do the hard work without needing to write code. By assembling the right modules and configurations we can create rich and complex features, without worrying about reinventing the wheel and write complex logic and code.

Suggested topics:

  • Showcases that explain site building approaches, case studies and lessons learned as a site builder
  • Module presentations, best practices and comparisons of competing site building tools for problems like layout management, workflows or content modelling
  • Process descriptions how site building can best fill the gap between end users, content editors, developers, ux designers and anyone else involved in Drupal web projects
  • Outside perspectives are also welcomed to learn how problems can be solved the site builder’s way in related web technologies

Symfony

The Symfony track is dedicated to exploring the Symfony ecosystem that built Drupal 8. Learn about the new Drupal 8 concepts powered by Symfony and Twig. Join industry-leading experts for a full day of Symfony, Drupal, and Twig. Whether you're a Symfony aficionado or a novice eager to learn more, this track will have something for everyone.

Suggested Topics

  • Twig use or best practices
  • Symfony components used in Drupal 8 or best practices (Dependency Injection, EventDispatcher, Serializer…)