2014 Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit

Jeremy and I attended the 2014 Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit in Portlant last week, and it was incredible. So many brilliant developers, and just as many awesome sessions. 

The opening keynote was given by Angie Byron, an employee with Acquia and contributor to Drupal Core. She went over D8 and all the cool new features it has, and whether we can start developing on it (spoiler: not yet). She showed us examples of the inline-editor, headless potential, and even some of the API changes. It was awesome! (Can't seem to find a video of that talk... I'll update this when I find one.) 

The second day's keynote was by Greg Dunlap, Senior Architect at Lullabot, entitled "Stay for the Community". You can read this talk here.

One of my favorite sessions there was "Deploying with Confidence: Automated Visual Regression and Acceptance Tests" by Katherine Senzee, which went over behavior driven development (BDD, a.k.a. Behat) with screenshot comparisons. (Session link, slides, example code.) The program would go through your site you're working on, and would take different screenshots in different browsers, using either Browserstack or Selenium, and would give you another picture highlighting differences in the first set of screenshots it took--your "baseline". You could also apply masks, which are usually dynamic areas that will always turn out different because of a video, slideshow, etc. 

"DIY Drupal 7 Performance" and "Custom commerce workflows - Building a better store owner experience" were other notable ones, about opitmizing your Drupal 7 site with the Site Audit module and customizing Commerce workflows using Views, Rules, and other modules.

Overall it was a great experience, and I am looking forward to next year's summit in Seattle!