Acquia Certification – the benefits of Drupal developer’s ultimate test

During the last year several Druids (myself included) have gotten certified by Acquia – sponsored by Druid, of course. Acquia Certification is the professional certification program for Drupal developers. Being a current benchmark in the technology, it verifies that the developer meets the standard and has an extensive expertise in the field.

I interviewed our recently certified developers, Sebastian, Markus, Robert, and Simo about their thoughts on the certification programs – Acquia Certified Developer and Acquia Certified Front End Specialist.

The Acquia Certified Developer certification is considered to be a more general exam that validates skills in the areas of Fundamental Web Concepts, Site Building, Front End Development (theming), and Back End Development (coding). The latter is more oriented on front-end technologies and the Drupal principles in this area.

Is the certification worth it?

If you ask us, the answers is yes, it’s definitely worth the effort. Everyone found the certification useful both for extending the knowledge and for demonstrating the level of expertise to customers and employers alike. Today, it’s very important to stand out in a competitive marketplace. In my view, this certification is an easy way to verify that your knowledge matches a certain standard. 

“Now I’ve got a better understanding of my stronger and weaker points,” Robert said. “This exam became a good opportunity to get the broadest view of the technology and also to identify areas where I can improve.”

Simo added: “I’ve been working with Drupal for a very long time starting with Drupal 5, then 6, 7, 8, and now Drupal 9. The preparation for the exam helped me to check out the current best practices and to get away from the old ways of writing code used in earlier versions of Drupal.” 

“This exam was more about the verification of what I actually know,” Markus said. “But it was a good experience.” Sebastian concluded that it was a good opportunity to demonstrate our proficiency to our customers. Indeed, some of our customers highly value this kind of confirmation about the level of Druid developers. 

About the exam questions

The questions were based on real work experience and thus they were relevant to daily work, which everyone thought was great. Working with a wide range of projects, you bump into different kinds of problems and should quickly come up with solutions. If you’ve solved some problem before, you can easily find the correct answer in the exam. If not, it’s a good opportunity to learn more about the subject so you know how to approach the problem when you face it.

“There were some tricky questions at first glance, but if you’re to be qualified as an expert in the field, you should know the precise answer to it,” commented Sebastian.

Simo pointed out that coding standards are quite often neglected, and the exam questions remind you about them. Markus found it important that the security related knowledge was tested thoroughly. 

Personally I like that an essential part of each Acquia exam is Fundamental Web Technologies where your knowledge of JavaScript and other underlying techs is tested.

Boost in professional development

I think the exam preparation provides you with a comprehensive overview. You start seeing the big picture and you can find out some details you might have missed or have not worked with before. It’s also some source of motivation to explore more, to step beyond the theory and apply the learnings in the code. So in that sense I think the certification can help you become a better developer. 

Both Sebastian and Robert thought that studying for the exam was probably the most beneficial part of the certification program. You can learn entirely new things. For example, I was surprised how much the Layout API and Layout Builder were improved in Drupal 9, and how much attention the Drupal community is now paying to accessibility.

“I’ve got a deeper understanding about caching systems in Drupal. Also the comprehensive study of Drupal API in general and in-depth look at backend concepts should be beneficial,” said Robert.

Markus pointed out that sometimes you’re more influenced by your peers than by any test as you learn from the actual building of the software, not from reading a book. But in both cases you promote yourself by applying new knowledge in your projects.

So if you’re into measuring your Drupal expertise…

We all definitely recommend the certification. If you’re planning to get certified, the tips from the study guides provided by Acquia come in handy. 

Basically, you have two main ways of measuring your expertise – via experience and real life projects, or via certifications. According to the guys, there are often debates over whether IT certifications have some value or not, but in this case they admit the test is useful, especially for Drupal CMS where the learning curve is quite steep. They suggest pursuing something similar for Vue or React if you’re more focused on frontend for example, as this certification is naturally mostly focused on Drupal.

“While it’s good to verify your expertise by passing the exams, you should not forget about contribution to the community which is also one way to show your knowledge,” added Markus. “If you don’t contribute that much, certification is a good way.”

The certifications themselves do not prove that you’re the most talented developer in the world, but they definitely help your career, especially if you’re just in the beginning. They’ll also help you to get noticed by big companies who pay a lot of attention to your education and certifications. Besides, it never hurts to learn something new. So, I encourage you to just go for it!

Useful links:

General information about the certification:
https://www.acquia.com/support/training-certification/acquia-certification

Study guides for Acquia Drupal certifications:
https://docs.acquia.com/certification/study-guides/

You can find our certified developers in Acquia Certification Registry:
https://certification.acquia.com/?org=druid&exam=All

Drupal 9 is soon here – the upgrade may be a breeze or a great undertaking

A new version of the Drupal content management system will be released on June 3rd 2020. You will have to migrate to Drupal 9 by November 2021, if you are now using Drupal 8. Drupal 7, on the other hand, will have a longer transition period until November 2022. After these deadlines, support for the earlier Drupal 7 and 8 versions will cease and security updates will no longer be provided for them. What will change with the new version 9? How much work is it to upgrade the system?
 

Good news first: upgrading will be over in a jiffy if you are running an up-to-date Drupal 8 system. Basically nothing will change. For example, our site here is already running on a beta version of Drupal 9, and the upgrade was done in essentially no time at all. However, every case will not be as straightforward, and especially Drupal 7 based websites will be in for quite an undertaking.

Drupal 8 upgrades easily and without risk

There’s no denying that many of Drupal’s previous major version upgrades have been quite laborious and even somewhat tricky, requiring a complete website overhaul from a technical standpoint.

But now everything is different. This time Drupal hasn’t been completely reinvented, and the version upgrade promises to be the easiest in a decade – provided that your web service is running the latest Drupal 8 version, since Drupal 9 is not that different from it.

From a technical standpoint, Drupal 9 is like the last version of Drupal 8, with deprecated code cleaned out and dependencies for third party systems updated. The migration is likely to be simple and smooth with no need for large overhauls for your website.

A basic web site upgrade to Drupal 9 will take next to no time, as long as the site is up to date and doesn’t use obsolete modules or APIs. If your site uses additional modules, it must be first checked whether they are ready to upgrade. Also custom code should be checked beforehand.

What if you are still running Drupal 7?

Long story short: this is the time you should start considering and planning a website overhaul, since you will be in for quite a big project with a deadline looming on November 28th 2022 when the support for Drupal 7 ceases.

Drupal 7 is still widely used, but updating to version 9 will inevitable be a much more complicated affair, or at least more laborious. The technology of Drupal 7 websites will have to be completely overhauled to be able to migrate to version 9, since the technological changes between versions 7 and 8 were so substantial.

The good news is, however, that in all likelihood this will be the last big migration that your web service will ever need.

This is because Drupal’s product development has shifted from a rather heavy project based model to a more modern and agile continuous development process: instead of tearing down and reintroducing the whole system every few years, new features and improvements will now be released in a faster cycle and with less upgrade effort.

Why should you upgrade to Drupal 9 now rather than later?

Feature-wise, Drupal 9 is a match for Drupal 8. Its purpose is to offer as effortless a migration from Drupal 8 as possible, with revisions done under the hood only to enable security support from November 2021 onwards. That means no hurry, right?

Well, there shouldn’t be a need to panic just yet, but we strongly advise you to upgrade as soon as possible, because, going forward, new features and improvements will be released twice a year through smaller updates. The next such update, Drupal 9.1.0, has been scheduled for release in December this year.

For example, the modernization of the admin interface is on its final stretch at the moment. It will introduce improvements to site administration and content management. When you upgrade your web service to Drupal 9 early on, you will be at the forefront of the system’s development cycle and will be able to reap the benefits of the continuous development process.

We can help you upgrade your Drupal system

We are among the top Drupal experts in Finland, and we know Drupal inside and out. Contact us – we’ll see what it will take to upgrade your web service to the new Drupal 9 version.

With our clients we have already gone through their upgrade needs on a preliminary level at the least. If this post has raised new questions or you have something on your mind, by all means get in touch with us.

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Edit June 25th 2020: Drupal 7’s end-of-life has been extended until November 2022 due to COVID-19 impact on budgets and businesses. The text has been updated accordingly.

Image: “Preparing for the group photo at DrupalCon Seattle” / Rob Shea / CC BY-SA 2.0

Druid’s DrupalCon Dublin session digest

Yes, yes, we already wrapped up the event for our part earlier this week. But we just couldn’t quite stop yet. What’s great with DrupalCon is that it really offers something for everyone, so we decided to list some of the sessions we found interesting and useful at the event. Oh the variety! If you were not in Dublin – well, even if you were – you can hopefully find something worth a listen out of these picks.

Let’s start with Angie Byron’s super interesting talk that presented an analysis of Drupal’s competitors, where they are currently outshining Drupal and how we can change that. Definitely worth checking out!

Being Human

The new ‘Being Human’ session track clearly resonated with the community. The track offered some excellent presentations, including:

• Justine Pocock’s How to deal with a life of crazy and keep your cool, mostly
• Jess Rose’s Impostor syndrome and individual competence
• Anthony Lindsay’s Happiness is…remote working.

Project Management

We also recommend checking the panel session about project methodologies (Scrum, Kanban and Waterfall) by Jeffrey McGuire, Shannon Vettes, Ashleigh Thevenet, Jenn Sramek, and a few others. Although the topic itself was already familiar to us, the session was really fun and inventively presented as a dating game.

As a sidenote: It took us slightly by surprise that not so many companies at DrupalCon seem to work with agile methods. Perhaps we should start expanding our agile trainings abroad… 😉

Technical

On the technical side, there were loads of good stuff. A few recommendations here:

• Fabian Franz’s presentation on a streaming based architecture and the possibilities it brings to performance optimization was very useful. 
• Dave Hall’s Let the machines do the work was a funny introduction to automation. 
• Lewis Nyman offered some useful tips for a collaborative design process and running effective workshops. 
• David Porter showed in his presentation how Varnish can be used beyond caching.

Business

And finally, on the business side, these two sessions hit the right note:

• Maxime Topolov’s presentation on scaling a Drupal agency from 1€M to 12€M of revenue
• Michel van Velde’s presentation on why, when and how you should consider diversifying your business

Now there’s some food for thought for us, and presumably for many others as well.

What were your favorite sessions? Any must-hears that we missed?

Diamonds and magic at DrupalCon Dublin

The dust has settled, we’ve recovered from Drupal Flu and had some time to reflect on our experience as DrupalCon Dublin diamond sponsors. It was awesome, no doubt about that! 

Ever since Druid was founded four years ago, our principle has been to actively support and give back to the Drupal community. In addition to sponsoring events, we’re also among the top 30 code contributors globally. 

DrupalCon diamond sponsorship had been on our bucket list since the very beginning, and we wouldn’t have been able to do this without the amazing Drupal community. So our biggest thanks go to everyone who has supported, encouraged, and challenged us along the way. It feels incredible that we’ve come this far in only four years. Believing in our own way of doing things, which may not be the most conventional way, has paid off. Our long-term plan is to expand our foothold outside of Finland, so raising people’s awareness of the company at DrupalCon certainly didn’t hurt.

We also want to thank the Drupal Association, Drupal Ireland and the Convention Centre Dublin for a very well organized event. The venue was great, with stunning views over the river Liffey, and the friendly staff made the event all the more delightful.

Our booth at the exhibit hall drew the crowd quite nicely. Whether it was because of the old school arcade games, our much-complimented swag featuring our recently renewed logo, or pure interest towards our doings, we were happy to see the bustle and make new acquaintances. Thanks to all booth visitors for the great chats and laughs!

Content-wise, Druid was represented by Lauri Eskola and Bart Feenstra who both gave two talks at the event. Special thanks go to our kindred spirit Jonna Tiainen who, as the Product Owner of the project, totally rocked our Restel.fi showcase presentation together with Bart. In the showcase, they described how a complex Drupal 8 site was built from an agile project management aspect – from a human aspect, really. Here’s the recording: 

And here you can check our other presentations:
    •    Drupal 8 theming in depth by Lauri
    •    A cautionary tale for defensive programmers by Bart
    •    Core conversation: Create a new user-facing theme by Lauri

A few of us stayed in Dublin for the sprints which were also very well organized, this time by Rachel Lawson. Bart contributed as a sprint mentor and Druid was one of the sponsors for the sprint mentors’ thank-you dinner.

Needless to say, this fun-loving bunch of Druids felt at home in Dublin in the late hours as well. We hosted some (improvised) (after) parties at our penthouse, and were one of the sponsors of the Women in Drupal get together. We also very much appreciated that we could fit into the amazing Trivia Night venue this year!

Without underrating the learning and networking aspects, one of the best parts about DrupalCon is that we get to hang out with each other as a team. As most of us are working at customers’ premises a few days per week and three of us are permanently abroad, spending time with each other at DrupalCon is pure gold. It wasn’t just about bonding over a pint of Guinness – well, mostly, but not only: we also took the time for a full-day internal training before the event officially kicked off.

Tired but happy, thank you so much Dublin and the awesome D-community! @DrupalConEur @druidfi #DrupalCon pic.twitter.com/lVTTzQQ8CE

— Roni Kantis (@roni_kantis) September 30, 2016

A great, memorable week with lots of new friends made, old friends caught up with and Druid’s magic sprinkled around Dublin. See you in Vienna next year, and hopefully many times before that!