The DrupalDay 2017 in Rome

This year was the 6th edition of the DrupalDay Italy, the main event to attend for Italian-speaking drupalists.

Previous editions took place in other main Italian cities like Milan, Bologna and Naples.

This time Rome had the privilege to host such a challenging event, ideally located in the Sapienza University Campus.

The non-profit event, was free of charge .

A 2-days event

Like most development-related events these days, the event spanned over 2 days, March, 3rd and 4th.

The first day was the conference day, with more than 20 talks split in 3 different “tracks” or, better, rooms.

In fact, there was no clear separation of scopes and the same room hosted Biz and Tech talks, probably (but this is just my guess) in an attempt to mix different interests and invite people to get out of their confort zone.

The second day was mainly aimed at developers of all levels with the “Drupal School” track providing courses ranging from site-building to theming.

The “Drupal Hackaton” track was dedicated to developers willing to contribute (in several ways) to the Drupal Core, community modules or documentation.

The best and the worst

As expected, I've found the quality of the talks a bit fluctuating.

Among the most interesting ones, I would definitely mention Luca Lusso's “ Devel – D8 release party ” and Adriano Cori's talks about HTTP Client Manager module.

I was also positively surprised (and enjoyed a lot) the presentation about “ Venice and Drupal ” by Paolo Cometti and Francesco Trabacchin where I discovered that the City of Venice has an in-house web development agency using Drupal for the main public websites and services.

On the other hand, I didn't like Edoardo Garcia's Keynote “Saving the world one Open Source project at a time”.

It seemed to me mostly an excuse to advertise his candidature as Director of the Drupal Association,

I had the privilege to talk about “ Decoupled frontend with Drupal 8 and OpenUI 5“.

The audience, initially surprised by the unusual Drupal-SAP (the company behind OpenUI) association, showed a real interest and curiosity.

After the presentation, I had chance to go into the details and discuss my ideas with a few other people.

I also received some critics, which I really appreciated and will definitely make me improve as a presenter.

Next one?

In the end, I really enjoyed the conference, both the contents and the ambiance, and will definitely join next year.