22.10.2024

Laurie Lim Sam

Druid’s ongoing partnership with Business College Helsinki

Druid is once again partnering with Business College Helsinki (BCH) for their Fullstack Development Program, something they’ve done before in 2022 and 2019. In fact, that’s how I first heard about the company. I was part of the 2021 cohort of students and knowing Druid’s connection to the program, I reached out and landed a summer internship. Afterward, I was lucky enough to be hired full-time. Since then, I’ve seen Druid continue to welcome interns from each new group and hire several of them as well.

Because I was once in the same position as these interns, it felt natural for me to help them. I remember how valuable it was to have someone show me the ropes when I started. That’s what motivated me to step into a mentorship role. I consider myself an Apprentice Initiator as I guide interns and junior developers at the start of their careers. I help new team members integrate into the company culture, remove blockers, and provide technical advice. I also mentor them to support their professional growth and check in regularly to assess their progress and well-being.

Real Projects and Practical Experience

At Druid, interns and junior developers typically join the Magical Support team. Our projects are in the maintenance phase, and the team is responsible for keeping projects secure and up to date, as well as handling any further development tasks requested by the client. It’s a great starting point for new developers because it provides a controlled environment where they can learn the ropes while contributing to real tasks from day one. This allows them to explore and grow their skills without the pressure of a fast-paced development cycle.

In early October, I returned to BCH to give a workshop on Drupal as part of Druid’s ongoing collaboration with the program. The workshop was scheduled to align with the start of the students’ year-end project, which was kicking off in two weeks—a decoupled application using Drupal and React. I put together the workshop with feedback from my colleagues who had also been interns and students in the same program, focusing on the things we wish we’d known when we were students. I covered practical tips and walked them through how our team collaborates on projects.

Supporting New Careers in Tech

Once the project wraps up, we’ll offer internship opportunities starting in January. This time, we have an experienced mentor who recently shared her knowledge at DrupalCon Barcelona, so the students will have even more resources and support.

Looking back, it’s amazing to think that I was once in the students’ shoes, and now, I’m part of a company that continues to give opportunities to new talent. It’s even more rewarding to know that I can play a role in helping aspiring developers as they start their own journeys.

Author

Laurie Lim Sam

Full Stack Developer

15.10.2024

Kirsi Vatanen

DrupalCon Barcelona 2024: It’s All About Community

Community is one of our core values, and it is also deeply reflected in the activities of the Drupal community. At the end of September, a few of us Druids had the chance to experience this sense of community firsthand at DrupalCon in Barcelona. The spirit of community was present in every meeting and conversation with colleagues from around the world—it truly seems to be part of the DNA of all Drupalists.

For me, DrupalCon was all about networking, interesting talks, and gaining a deeper understanding of the Drupal community. The highlight of the event was undoubtedly Dries Buytaert’s #Driesnote, which captivated the audience from start to finish. From a marketer’s perspective, the visual aspects of Dries’ presentation, the demos, and the way he built anticipation worked wonderfully—he really knows how to capture an audience’s attention.

The three-day event offered plenty of interesting technical presentations and, luckily for me as a marketer, also some less technical ones. On the sponsor floor, I got to know partners’ stories and learn what was trending at the booths—from fun treats and activities like caricatures by an artist who normally works on La Rambla, to memorable branded items such as hot sauce and the T-shirts that attendees could customize on the spot.

We’ve gathered our reflections about the event in this blog post. Each of us had our own goals and areas of interest, but one thing was consistent across all our reflections: the sense of community and the people.

“You can spot the Druids by their red T-shirts” was a comment I heard often—our goal of being recognizable and approachable clearly paid off.

Dive into our team’s thoughts about the DrupalCon Barcelona:

Engagement, Growth, and Drupal

For Arto, DrupalCon Barcelona was a journey of innovation and community. From exploring the future of Drupal CMS to hiking the breathtaking trails of Sant Llorenç del Munt, the week was filled with learning, adventure, and reconnecting with old and new friends.

Barcelona has a particularly warm place in Arto’s heart – find out why.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

Mikko attended his first DrupalCon back in 2015, also in Barcelona. This year’s event reminded him of how far Drupal and the community have come. He was especially impressed by the progress of the Starshot project and the unveiling of new features that make Drupal more marketer-friendly while retaining the flexibility developers love.

Explore Mikko’s highlights

Not the City, But the People

For Simo, DrupalCon was all about reconnecting with the people behind the screens. The event provided an opportunity to meet friends, collaborators, and new acquaintances, making it a true highlight of his journey.

Simo also shares his thoughts on the evolving technologies within Drupal, such as the Experience Builder, and the role of accessibility in Drupal CMS.

Read Simo’s full reflections

Community, Tech, and Inspiration

For Toni, attending DrupalCon for the first time meant embracing the supportive and passionate Drupal community. From reconnecting with familiar faces to attending sessions on debugging and accessibility, Toni highlighted the power of knowledge-sharing and collaboration.

Read about Toni’s reflections

Notes from the First-Timer

Yevgeniya’s talk on mentorship and training for Drupal developers was well received, showcasing the community’s dedication to nurturing new talent. Yev also cherished witnessing Dries Buytaert’s keynote, further strengthening her connection to the Drupal community.

Discover Yev’s experience as a speaker

Photo Bram Driesen, licenced as deed Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 The original image was edited by narrowing it.

Author

Kirsi Vatanen

Marketing Manager

15.10.2024

Yevgeniya Kobrina

The notes of the DrupalCon first-timer

Although this wasn’t my first public speaking experience, it was my first time speaking at the biggest Drupal event. The most challenging part of the process for me was choosing a topic. After almost nine years of working with Drupal, I had accumulated enough development and project leadership experience to share, but every idea seemed to have already been covered. None of them really made me feel excited. I knew I needed to talk about something I was confident and passionate about to make it more engaging for the audience.

Then my husband asked, “What brings you joy? What are you proud of?” That’s when I realized: my long path in mentoring—helping others take their first steps in web development, learning Drupal, and building their confidence—was what I was truly proud of.

I felt mixed emotions throughout the submission process: excitement that I was finally proposing a session for DrupalCon, doubts about the topic’s value for such a large event, fear that I wouldn’t deliver the message concisely and engagingly (since I only had 15 minutes to speak), and, of course, the stress of having only three days to complete the submission. So you can imagine my disbelief when the session got accepted—and even more when I was chosen as a Featured Track Speaker for the Open Web community track!

Later on, when more than twenty people attended my talk, Empowering Drupal Developers: Redefining Training and Mentorship, and actively asked questions and sought my advice afterward, I felt reassured. It confirmed that the Drupal community truly cares about supporting each other and nurturing new developers. The community is clearly passionate about spreading knowledge and fostering a culture of mentorship and inclusion within their companies.

One of the biggest highlights of the event for me was witnessing Dries’ keynote from the audience. Seeing the father of Drupal casually queuing for waffles and chatting with everyone around him was surreal. It’s incredible how naturally people come together to share experiences, ask questions, and collaborate on projects. Contribution Day was another highlight for me—watching people volunteer their time and knowledge to improve and build the technology we all use and love was inspiring.

Overall, it was an amazing experience, both as a speaker and as a community member. I’m already thinking about what topic I could present at the next DrupalCon Europe. See you there!

DrupalCon Barcelona: Tech, Community, and Inspiration

DrupalCon Barcelona: Community Reunions, Business Insights, and an Unforgettable Hike

DrupalCon Barcelona: Not the City, But the People

Photos
Hero Bram Driesen, licenced as deed Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0. The original image was edited by narrowing it.

Author

Yevgeniya Kobrina

Senior Developer

14.10.2024

Simo Hellsten

Not the city but the people

I spent four nights in Barcelona but as for the landscape, I pretty much got to a conference center that was just the same as any other center and a hotel that was just the same as any other hotel. But for me the event was not about the city but the people attending.

Having worked in Drupal Core teams actively for some years I meet other developers and specialists on weekly bases in online meetings. With the Starshot initiative going on, with some people I even have regular meetings twice a week. DrupalCon is an excellent place to meet those people live or at least some of them. What a great feeling to actually meet someone after a couple of years of regular meetings over the internet. And also to meet your friends and acquaintances from the previous DrupalCons of course.

This time I had prepared a checklist of people I should have a chat with – to talk about a common task, ask advice for a project, to offer testing for a module or just to catch up. And by the last day of the trip I was happy to see all the names on the list checked, while having also made a number of new friends.

The cutting edge Drupal – a two edged sword

But it’s not only the people – we are also interested in what they do. This Summer and Autumn has really rushed the tech forward on many fronts. After the Starshot initiative was announced at DrupalCon Portland in the Spring of 2024 the community has really pulled together trying to make the deadline of Drupal CMS release in mid-January 2025. A lot of usability improvements have been planned to the Drupal CMS package, most important of which is the Experience Builder. Experience Builder allows easy but powerful wysiwyg page building experience with cutting edge components.

Experience Builder will unleash the creativity of the content editor, but Drupal has many faces. While one module or recipe will emphasize freedom another will be built on strict standards and structure. I myself can’t say which excites me more, the free flow of Drupal CMS and Experience Builder or the Schema.org Blueprints that automates Drupal content building using the Schema.org standard information structures. Sticking to the predefined content standards will make the site content extremely compatible with search engines and other automated tools. I expect it will probably also help with AI tools as well.

So I am looking at two seemingly opposite approaches to web content and love them both – they both have their uses but may even work together at the same time. Building components respecting the standards and fluently organizing them into pages using a modern page builder is something where Drupal can easily manage both in the future.

Being the one who always complains

For a few months I have been working as a member of Drupal Starshot’s (now officially named Drupal CMS) accessibility team. As Drupal CMS extends Drupal Core with a selection of prominent contributed modules we also wanted to expand the accessibility audits.

Dupal has a lot of great contributed modules and a lot of good people have poured their time and hearts into making them. Those modules that will be included in the Drupal CMS have now been under public spotlight for several months. As some of them have only one or two maintainers, I can imagine it’s a lot of pressure. (There are more people contributing code of course, but a maintainer has to make the decisions which fixes and changes go into the releases.) And now – on top of everything else – there are also me and my friends testing for accessibility and asking to fix this and that to meet some WCAG criteria.

Here the live meetings at DrupalCon help a lot. It’s one thing to send a formal sheet of accessibility issues by email to the maintainer and say: please fix this – and something quite different to have a cup of coffee with the person and say: Hi, nice to meet you. Has your module been audited for accessibility? If you like, I could do it. How would you like to get the list of findings?

A lot of developers are not so great with people skills and under pressure worse. I myself often say that I’m good with numbers and bad with people, but I try to learn. And I think I’m making some progress, as is Drupal’s accessibility.

DrupalCon Barcelona: Tech, Community, and Inspiration

DrupalCon Barcelona: Community Reunions, Business Insights, and an Unforgettable Hike

Photo Bram Driesen, licenced as deed Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 The original image was edited by narrowing it.

Author

Simo Hellsten

Full Stack Developer

14.10.2024

Mikko Hämäläinen

DrupalCon 2024 in Barcelona: Reflections on Community Evolution and Business Insights

Having DrupalCon 2024 in Barcelona holds a special significance for me. It was the first DrupalCon I ever attended, right after I joined Druid in 2015.

The almost ten-year gap between these two events is apparent in many ways. The community—and especially Drupal itself—has come a long way over the years. But there are also similarities. Back in 2015, the community was eagerly waiting for Drupal 8 to be released. The new version would bring significant improvements to Drupal, mainly the move to object oriented coding and the adoption of the Symfony framework. These changes also meant that from Drupal 8 onwards there was an upgrade path that allowed sites to be upgraded between major Drupal versions with relatively little effort. It was a massive change that benefited both the developers and the customers.

In 2024, the community is once again on the cusp of major, positive change. The ongoing Drupal Starshot project will release a new distribution of Drupal around the end of the year. This distribution will be somewhat unimaginably called Drupal CMS. While the name might spark some debate, the features it will bring will undoubtedly make Drupal the best and most marketing-friendly content management system to date. The “old” Drupal Core isn’t going anywhere, and it will remain a top choice for more custom, less marketing-driven web services.

During his annual “Driesnote” presentation at DrupalCon Europe, project lead Dries Buytaert showcased the outcomes of the community’s work on the Starshot project—and it was truly impressive. The customer centric presentation focused on showing everyone what can already be done with Drupal CMS. My personal favorites were the AI assistant for generating new content types, fields and importing data from existing web sites, the new recipes that allow grouping and installing site functionality with almost a single click and the ease of creating impressive looking web pages with the CMS’ Experience Builder.

Many have said that this year’s Driesnote was the best one yet, and I have to agree.

Another highlight of my DrupalCon experience was the Drupal Business Dinner. Formerly known as the CEO Dinner, this event brings agency leaders together to network and discuss the business side of the Drupal ecosystem. It’s an annual event, preceded by a survey on the state of the Drupal business, with the results presented and discussed during the dinner. This year, the presentation at the dinner was a shorter summary, while the full version was presented the next day during a BOF session at the venue.

A group of people discussing on CEO dinner.

The dinner is always an excellent opportunity to meet people working with similar challenges but in a different environment. This year, I found myself seated with people from the US, Canada, and Slovenia. We enjoyed a thorough discussion about the global state of affairs, accompanied by a hearty three-course dinner.

DrupalCon Barcelona: Not the City, But the People

DrupalCon Barcelona: Community Reunions, Business Insights, and an Unforgettable Hike

Photos:
Heading and middle Bram Driesen, licenced as deed Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0. The original images were edited by narrowing it.
Lower Jean-Paul Vosmeer, licensed as Attribution-ShareAlike. The original image was edited by narrowing it.

Author

Mikko Hämäläinen

CEO

11.10.2024

Toni Nissinen

DrupalCon Barcelona 2024: Tech, Community, and Inspiration

DrupalCon Barcelona 2024, great location, great weather, great tech and even greater community. Thanks to everyone that I had the honor of speaking with!

This was my first DrupalCon, though not my first Drupal event. Just like at the camps, what stood out to me most was the community – caring, supportive, and welcoming. Seeing a familiar face first thing in the morning as I picked up my badge immediately made me feel at home.

Of course, comparing DrupalCon to local Drupal Camps and meetups highlights some differences. DrupalCon is way bigger, with many more talks and BoF sessions, often diving deeper into technical and theoretical aspects. There were sessions on debugging techniques, accessibility (which, by the way, is top-notch), and other specialized Drupal topics.

The long conference days can be exhausting, and it’s impossible to attend every session you’d like to, but luckily, most of them are recorded and available on YouTube later. It’s such a great way to share knowledge across the community. I love that anyone who builds something innovative or learns something new can share it for the benefit of all.

I was especially excited to see some users (content creators, project owners, etc.) participating in DrupalCon. It’s fantastic that they could gather new ideas and insights on how to advance their projects. This, of course, might require some understanding of the technical aspects of Drupal, but I highly encourage more people using Drupal in their projects to attend future DrupalCons. There is so much value in being part of this community.

Read also about my visit to Drupal Mountain Camp

More about DrupalCon:

DrupalCon Barcelona: Community Reunions, Business Insights, and an Unforgettable Hike

DrupalCon Barcelona: Reflections on Community Evolution and Business Insights

DrupalCon Barcelona: Not the city but the people

Photo: Paul Johnson, licensed as Attribution-NoDerivs. The original image was edited by narrowing it.

Author

Toni Nissinen

Drupal Developer

10.10.2024

Arto Iijalainen

DrupalCon Barcelona 2024: Community Reunions, Business Insights, and an Unforgettable Hike

This was the second time I attended DrupalCon in Barcelona. Back in 2015, I traveled there earlier with my wife (girlfriend at the time), explored the city and got engaged!

On the morning of the first conference day, my wife-to-be flew back home, and the conference started. Whatever agenda I had prepared for the event was pretty much washed away.

This time, my wife decided to stay home with the kids and I was able to fully concentrate on the conference. My agenda was to understand what Starshot / Drupal CMS will bring to the table and how far are we. And, of course, to reconnect with old friends and make new ones within the Drupal community.

I am really thrilled with the progress of Drupal CMS! The first release candidate will be launched on December 11th at the time of DrupalCon Singapore and the actual 1.0 release will happen on 15th of January 2025. The only thing that we really need to wait for is the Experience Builder, which will be released with the Drupal CMS 2.0 in late 2025. The Experience Builder will be a game changer for the content editors as it enables them to easily compose the pages they are building with the components tied to the organization’s design system.

DrupalCon isn’t just about the conference sessions. As an owner and board member, I always find it interesting to attend the CEO/business dinner and hear about the latest market trends in Europe and the US.

The cherry on top of the entire trip was the DrupalHike, where we climbed to the summit of Sant Llorenc del Munt! Our guide and fellow Drupalist, Fred, led us along lesser-traveled paths with stunning views. The sense of adventure still lingers with me.

Mikko and Arto on the top of the Sant Llorenc del Munt

Author

Arto Iijalainen

Project Manager & Scrum Master

05.09.2024

Mikko Hämäläinen

Website personalization in practice

One of the key challenges for online services is the ability to provide content and services to diverse user groups while maintaining discoverability. A company’s website serves many different user groups, such as prospective and current customers, job seekers, and investors. Each of these groups has its own specific needs when it comes to content.

In e-commerce, personalization has long been a standard, at least in the form of product recommendations. However, in other online services, personalization is often conspicuously absent, particularly in the public sector, which is increasingly offering transactional services through its websites. Megamenus have been an impersonal response to this challenge, one that could be addressed more intuitively by genuinely considering the user’s needs.

In this blog, I’ll show how a marketer can implement personalization in practice by leveraging the Drupal content management system and Mautic marketing automation platform—without needing to dive deep into the world of IT.

Target communication to different customer groups using automation

A company’s website is connected to its marketing automation system, and they have launched a new product serving two distinct customer groups: private sector businesses and public sector organizations. The marketing team has created a landing page in the content management system that provides a general overview of the product. However, they want to emphasize features that are particularly relevant to each customer group.

The marketing automation system segments visitors based on the content they have previously browsed, categorizing them as either private sector or public sector customers. Personalization is applied to all site visitors, regardless of whether they are identified users or anonymous visitors.

Putting plans into action

Let’s start by creating a dynamic content section tailored to private sector customers in the marketing automation system. We’ll create a list of personalization features that are relevant to private sector customers, illustrate it, and add a call-to-action link at the end.

This content section will be given the short name “customer-experience-private” (asiakaskokemus-yksityinen).

Next, we define the conditions under which the content will be displayed on the website. It’s sufficient for us that the user belongs to the customer segment “private sector customer” (Yksityisen sektorin asiakas).

After that, we move to the content management system to edit the previously created landing page. The dynamic content is embedded between the sections titled “Kohti parempaa asiakaskokemusta” and “Personoinnin rakentaminen”.

Dynamic content from Mautic can be easily embedded into any content management system using HTML code. The necessary line of code can be copied and modified to include the correct dynamic content shortcode.

If no dynamic content is available to display, the   automatically added by the editor will appear as a blank space on the page. However, this can be replaced with default text instead.

Testing personalization

Testing personalization is straightforward. Start by visiting the site in incognito mode, which keeps the user anonymous. The finalized landing page will look like this when the user has not been identified as a private sector customer.

For testing purposes, find the anonymous user in Mautic and manually add him to the “Private Sector Customer” (Yksityisen sektorin asiakas) segment. Mautic can track both identified and unidentified users; the latter are users who do not yet have contact information or marketing consent. Personalization is one of the few ways to enhance the customer experience for these anonymous visitors.

Normally, segmentation would be automated by building a campaign within the marketing automation system. The customer segment could be determined based on the visitor’s browsing history, such as their interest in specific customer case studies or other pages.

However, for this test, we’ll manually add the user to the segment.

The test user refreshes the landing page in his browser, and Mautic loads the personalized content onto the page. This means that the list of personalization features relevant to private sector customers—created with ChatGPT—appears in the desired location on the site.

Simple Yet Complex

This simple example demonstrates how website content can be tailored and targeted to a specific audience. The same outcome can be achieved in various ways, such as by creating separate landing pages for each segment and directing visitors to the appropriate pages via marketing campaigns. When personalization is integrated into marketing automation, it allows for better control over the customer experience for visitors arriving organically on the site.

Segments and personalized content can be created freely, making it possible to implement more complex scenarios as needed. Below is a view of three different versions of the same landing page: one for non-segmented visitors and two for segmented user groups.

a view for no personalizationed page, personalization for private and public sector.

I implemented this example using the standard features of Drupal and Mautic in Druid’s demo environment. With a few small adjustments, the content editing experience can be further improved. For instance, dynamic content can be embedded by selecting the appropriate content block directly from the drop-down menu in Drupal’s editor.

If this topic piques your interest or resonates with your everyday needs, feel free to reach out. I’d be happy to give you a more detailed demonstration of Mautic’s functionalities.

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Author

Mikko Hämäläinen

CEO

15.05.2024

Simo Hellsten

Fix accessibility problems at the (open) source

Accessibility is an important topic for people responsible for the profits and expenses of the web world – somewhat dependent on the nature of the actor. A lot of web commerce sites would do well welcoming the money from those clients who benefit from improved accessibility, while the public sector, that has no direct income, is bound by the law to provide accessible services. Faced with ever-tightening budget constraints, decision-makers may wonder about the most effective ways to improve accessibility. The easy answer is of course – have someone else do it, and for free.

The content of the internet today consists of a multitude of services, platforms and frameworks. While there are several strictly commercial companies with successful products, the majority of the internet we see today has its base on open source software. About two thirds of all the websites are built on open source software content management systems (CMS). The overwhelmingly biggest player in the field is WordPress, while Drupal is a strong second for large and complex sites.

Open source code is free to distribute and modify within the limits of it’s license. This has usually resulted in the software being developed and maintained by online communities. And the communities take the accessibility of their products seriously.

In the recent past I myself have spoken at both WordPress and Drupal developer community events and Drupal is a CMS where I contribute to accessibility and usability regularly. At Drupal’s chat forum the accessibility channel has 1560 participants ranging from developers interested in accessibility to hard-core accessibility professionals – some of whom are currently also working on the next generation of the international web content accessibility guidelines, WCAG 3. Drupal has also a monthly live online meeting on accessibility where one can present issues or ask questions. This is one of the ways to share accessibility knowledge in the community.

A typical website, depending on the complexity, has a development team of just a few people. While a lot of developers today have some level of accessibility skills, not all projects have an actual accessibility specialist in their team. This is where the community shows its power. Accessibility is always easier when done right from the beginning, instead of fixing afterwards based on testing the otherwise ready product. When the CMS of choice has gone through accessibility testing before being released as an installable distribution. A lot of the work has already been done by the community. And if (or more likely when) new issues arise during the individual site’s development, the community is available for advice on best practices and fixing newly found issues.

The community will help you to fix accessibility, but it is a two way road. When working on a project, every once in a while you come up with big or small accessibility issues that can be fixed at the source. These can be for example administration theme issues or maybe even some core JavaScript. When you or your team fix such an issue on your production site, make sure to give your code back to the CMS project core – or if the finding was about a contributed open source module to its source code. This way the effect of your finding will have a much bigger impact all over the Internet.

Just this spring my team, in which we develop and maintain a small number of university services, two of which use Drupal 10, identified three small accessibility issues that were part of the Drupal core. As we fixed the accessibility for our sites I made merge requests to Drupal core. This way we not only contributed to Drupal development but also got additional review for the code and even some advice on how to best implement the solutions proposed by our team’s web accessibility specialist in the Drupal core context. I even learned how to write my first Nightwatch.js test for the feature – something I probably wouldn’t have ended up doing if we had only fixed the issue on our own projects.

Now that our three small accessibility fixes have been merged to Drupal core, by the time sites have updated to the latest bug fix releases, we have contributed to one in eight enterprise web sites around the world. In small steps, we can make the world a better place. This is open source at its best.

Simo is member of Drupal UX team and following accessibility issues. He is also member of W3C Cognitive Accessibility Community Group, W3C Nordic Accessibility Group and IAAP.

Author

Simo Hellsten

Full Stack Developer

17.04.2024

Toni Nissinen

Mountain Highs: My unforgettable experience at Mountain Camp Davos

This year, I had the fantastic opportunity to attend Mountain Camp in Davos, Switzerland. It marked several firsts for me: my first Drupal Camp outside Finland, my first visit to Switzerland, and my first work-related conference trip. I’m excited to share my experiences with you in this blog post.

The experience overall was just awesome! The Drupal community is so welcoming and supportive. Immediately I felt welcomed to the community and didn’t hesitate to be myself and ask questions. We went skiing, some of us on multiple days, had dinner together and a couple of drinks along the way. Chill atmosphere all the way for the whole week.

Group photo of Mountain Camp attendees. Photo Patrick Itten.

I met many wonderful and inspiring people around the world. I couldn’t be happier to meet all of you, a special shout-out to those who were there for the pre-event days! It was so exciting to hear all the stories about how people do their work and how they participate with both the global and local Drupal communities. Even though there are many companies doing similar things with Drupal, we should not fear collaborating with each other over the companies and sharing knowledge with each other. Something you have been struggling with recently could be a piece of cake for someone else and vice versa. This is the essence of community: helping each other succeed. What we contribute benefits not just ourselves but also others within the community.

The event was packed full of useful information and the session topics, with sessions covering a wide range of topics from Drupal security practices to card games about hardware and software. Some topics were about how we could develop a software solution with a customer and some were about developing a smart watch application. The variety of topics was astonishing as I thought that all the topics will be strictly Drupal, especially the nerdy code stuff, though there were also those kinds of topics. I wish I could participate in every session as there were so many interesting and inspiring speakers and topics.

Toni Nissinen etualalla parvekkeella. Taustalla näky yAlpit

I made numerous global contacts, and I feel these connections will extend beyond simple LinkedIn additions. They are fellow professionals I can reach out to for advice and support, which I value immensely. I look forward to meeting many of them again at future events and hope to connect with new people.

The sessions in Drupal Camp were really interesting and some of the topics were not that technical Drupal development topics (the nerdy code stuff) so in addition to developers and people working around Drupal, people who use Drupal based solutions and who are interested in maybe making a switch to using Drupal can get invaluable information. In general if you work in a team developing a software solution, even if it’s not Drupal, you might find something useful in these kinds of events.

I highly recommend participating in Drupal Camps and Cons in general. The next opportunity to join is at DrupalCamp Helsinki + Baltics on April 26th! Be sure to check the website for schedule and registration, by the way it’s FREE!

I’ll be there, too and if you have any questions, or if you just want to chat, please feel free to say hi!

Photos: Toni Nissinen and Patrick Itten.

Author

Toni Nissinen

Drupal Developer

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bcookie	2 years	This cookie is set by linkedIn. The purpose of the cookie is to enable LinkedIn functionalities on the page.
bscookie	2 years	This cookie is a browser ID cookie set by Linked share Buttons and ad tags.
lang	session	This cookie is used to store the language preferences of a user to serve up content in that stored language the next time user visit the website.
lidc	1 day	This cookie is set by LinkedIn and used for routing.
UserMatchHistory	1 month	Linkedin - Used to track visitors on multiple websites, in order to present relevant advertisement based on the visitor's preferences.

Cookie	Duration	Description
_hjAbsoluteSessionInProgress	30 minutes	No description
_hjFirstSeen	30 minutes	This is set by Hotjar to identify a new user’s first session. It stores a true/false value, indicating whether this was the first time Hotjar saw this user. It is used by Recording filters to identify new user sessions.
_hjid	1 year	This cookie is set by Hotjar. This cookie is set when the customer first lands on a page with the Hotjar script. It is used to persist the random user ID, unique to that site on the browser. This ensures that behavior in subsequent visits to the same site will be attributed to the same user ID.
_hjIncludedInPageviewSample	2 minutes	No description
_hjIncludedInSessionSample	2 minutes	No description

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