Dustin Harrell
Wait What's Drupal Camp?
Drupal Camp Asheville is a two day event organized by the local Asheville Drupal User Group with a focus on bringing Drupal experts, business owners, and web developers from the greater Asheville area together to celebrate the platform. Local and regional businesses are usually in attendance to showcase recent projects developed on Drupal and related web technologies. Aspiring web developers and business stake holders attend to explore what Drupal has to offer. Others, such as myself, go for the community, to build lasting relationships, discuss bleeding edge web technologies, and advocate for Drupal.
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Camp Overview
Friday is typically a hands-on Drupal training day while Saturday offers a session schedule allowing experts the opportunity to discuss Drupal related topic's over the course of an hour. There are always a variety of interesting sessions focusing on everything from front-end development tools, project management methodologies, and development best practices.
Drupal Camp Asheville 2018 Takeaways
I couldn't attend all of the sessions but the ones I did attend were awesome. Here are a few of the topics discussed that I am super excited about!
CSS Grid
At the dawn of web creation there were tables, but they were too limiting. Then came the float based layout system, but clearing floats became annoying and with the rise of the smart phone era responsive web design became the standard. So it became apparent again that that we needed a bit more, and the flexbox layout system was conceived. We can now vertically center content, re-order content within flex containers based on the size of the screen and things were well.. at least for a season.
Introducing CSS Grid, the latest layout system native to CSS spec. It's powerful and flexible, ironically more so than flexbox, and better yet browser support is at a point where it can be used in production.
Lullabot's, Mike Herchel's session covering CSS Grid was both hilarious and informative.
CSS Grid Links
Gatsby
Is it me or has the internet just been getting slower lately? We are spoiled and require instant satisfaction and anything less is unacceptable. As websites have become more reliant on larger assets such as libraries, videos, and images old technologies are really starting to show their age.
Gatsby on the other hand is not slow, it's actually blazing-fast. Gatsby is a static site generator built on React.js. React's virtual dom is inherently fast improving perceived site performance by loading content on the fly via javascript.
Mediacurrent's, Grayson Hicks discussed the benefits of using Gatsby.
Gatsby Related Links
- React: A JavaScript library for building user interfaces
- GatsbyJS: A Powerful FE Tool for Decoupled Devs
- GatsbyJS: Blazing-fast static site generator for React
Pattern Based Design Systems
Atomic design principles have been around for a while now and have made way for systems such as Pattern Lab and KSS. They have also improved front-end development practices by providing a methodology of breaking down components into smaller re-usable pieces resulting in cleaner brand centered ui design.
Derek Reese discussed many tools that Red Hat uses to empower their developers by simplifying the process of informing Drupal of component based configurations.