Behind the Drupal Curtains at MWDS

In the past, I’ve told you why I feel Drupal Camps are a great experience. Today, I’d like to share why I think development summits (Dev Days as they’re called in Europe) are even better.

Last week, colleague Scott Reeves and I attended the Midwest Developer Summit in Ann Arbor, MI. It was two days of coding, friendships, and lots of discussions. It was also my favourite camp or summit experience to date!

Pre Summit and Welcome dinner

While I was packing I started having second thoughts. This was a camp of code sprints - I was really worried that I wouldn’t be able to contribute. I guess it was the imposter syndrome talking, but I was nervous!

Once we arrived on Thursday evening and saw all the familiar faces, I felt at ease. These were people that I really admired in the community and I was looking forward to working on issues with them. We caught up on each other’s latest adventures and talked about what we wanted to work on at the sprints.

The highlight of dinner was Michael Hess’ creativity (he’s the organizer/host). He prepared a menu of drinks with Drupal-themed names. I had a “Symfony components” on Thursday and “Twig templates” on Friday. For developers out there who are reading this, you can just imagine the laughter involved when ordering drinks called Cache Rebuild, Drupal 6, Slack vs IRC, SA05, and the Unsupported Module!

The Summit

Drupal developer summits are a weekend of code sprints. You can bring what you’d like to work on, whether it’s core or contrib, or you can help out with some of the core issues that need work or reviewing.

MWDS was interesting because the room was full of many well known core contributors and a high number of core committers as well. It was really exciting working with these amazing people and learning from them.

I guess I expected most of the summit to be sitting down at our computers and coding, but I was wrong. A lot of it actually revolved around discussions. It was fascinating to hear these conversations happen in real time and see how much thought and debate goes into making decisions about things like infrastructure or experimental modules in core.

It's not just about the code

On Saturday morning - day two of the summit - my MacBook failed to boot. I was super upset because I thought this meant I was not going to be able to contribute anything and that my day at the Summit would be wasted. But from this upset, I learned a valuable lesson: It’s not just about the code and contributing to the issue queue - after all, that’s something you can do at home. Summits are about the people that are in the room and what you can learn from them while you’re there.

Fellow summit participant Cathy introduced me to Anna, a new contributor to Drupal, and encouraged me to help Anna with a patch. With help from Tim and an issue suggested by Jess, I was able to help Anna with her first patch. It was really exciting - and totally changed my unfortunate morning into a positive experience. After that, I did what I like to call “shoulder surfing” with some of the people in the room. I watched them as they worked on their issues, asked questions when I didn’t understand something, and learned a lot from the way they tackled, debugged, and solved the things they were working on. I’ve noticed that I learn best from watching, copying and then adapting the things I’ve seen to my own workflow.

Just being at the summit in the room was inspiring. As people discussed issues out loud, it almost felt like drupal.org was coming to life. Being in the same room with so many well known contributors was inspiring - but being able to discuss and engage with them on their work was incredible. I remember one moment where Tim was reviewing code for the layout builder module. He replaced a couple of lines of code with a really useful function and when I marveled at it, he laughed and said, “I got that (function) in core.” That was a classic dev summit moment for me.

It’s always about community

On Saturday night, the surprise entertainment was a planetarium show. It was unexpected and wonderful. As we were learning about the different stars and planets that can be seen in the night sky, the host Michael would throw in Drupal drops to make us laugh. For example, when we were looking at the great storm on planet Mars, the animation showed a little Drupal drop swirling around the dust.

We say this over and over, but Drupal is only as strong as the community that supports it. And it's all thanks to the contributors who support Drupal's development. I spent a weekend with some of these inspiring people, looking at issues in core, at the layouts initiative, and being a part of a new contributor’s first patch - and I feel inspired and full of energy to continue contributing. For people who like me, who are maybe nervous to attend a code sprint or dev summit, I would say go for it! Don’t let the imposter syndrome pull you down, everyone is able to contribute! There’s something you can help with even if your laptop breaks :) Can’t wait for next year’s MWDS!