DDD is mostly for ā surprise! ā Drupal developers. This year it took place between 21 and 26 of June in Milan. People were on code sprints all week long and on Thursday, Friday and Saturday there were sessions and workshops as well.
I went to 2 sessions. The keynote of Bojan ŽivanoviÄ was about building reusable php libraries. Bojan is the architect behind Drupal Commerce 2 which is a prominent example of adopting the āleave the Drupal islandā principle. They are not only advocating the usage of external solutions in Drupal but also creating libraries that are usable outside Drupal.
The session of Major Zsófi about organizing Drupal events could not have come from a more authentic source. She shared her experience about the practical aspects of building a community and the importance of providing coffee.
All session recordings are or will be available online.
I attended three workshops. A really excellent one by Florian Loretan was about the trending search solution, elasticsearch. Pieter Frenssen had a workshop about Automated testing in Drupal 8. For me this proved to be the most valuable one since I could not keep up with the changes in this field since Drupal 7 and I need it in my contrib work. All my respects to Pieter who was able to present for 3.5 hours in a way that noone fell asleep even though we were just after lunch.
The third workshop I attended was my own 2 hours workshop about Caching in Drupal 8. I learnt a lot about this important topic during preparation and since only around one person left the room it might have been useful for the audience as well.
In the sprint room I joined the Commerce team. The team seemed to have been cursed. A laptop was stolen from the sprint site on Wednesday. Then on Thrusday night Bojan's MacBook got also stolen from a restaurant with days of uncommitted work. Fortunately, with the effective help of the organizers (which among others included providing the victims a spare laptop and taking them to the police to file a report) they could participate in the sprints only with a minimal amount of delay. As a result we could finish several issues in the Commerce, Commerce Migrate, Token and Address modules.
Sightseeing with drupalists
But the most important part of DDD was the social aspects. I met old friends and got to know new interesting people. Wednesday evening there was a quantitywise challenging dinner for speakers. On other nights we visited several parts of the beautiful city of Milano. Huge thanks to all the organisers, you did an amazing job! Hope to see you next year!