Two weeks ago, the Northwestern IT S&S Academic Software Development team – Paul Eisen, Jorge Lopez, and Gerard Panganiban – attended the Midwest Drupal Camp, held at DePaul University’s Lincoln Park campus. The event was an excellent opportunity for us to discover new tools, learn from renowned developers and leading Drupal practitioners from across the country, and network with the service providers, hosting vendors, and other members of the web development community.
We learned from different speakers about all the bits and pieces involved in Drupal and how it can relate to our lives. The keynote session “Actions Speak Louder than Code” talked about how our intentions translate into actions, and how those actions can translate into how productive and successful we are. Powerful tools such as Drupal help a developer work smarter and come up with better solutions.
Here are some key takeaways from the event:
- Zeplin automatically generates accurate specs, assets and code snippets from designs into a web project
- Tools that help audit the stylesheet on your websites are Parker, Analyze CSS, Project Wallace (a GUI tool), and CSS Lint (forces you to write clean CSS code!)
- Drupal Layout Builder easily creates pages using drag and drop and WYSIWYG tools
- Static site generators allow the creation of static pages quickly. Here are examples of static site generators for Drupal: Jekyll, Gatsby (site showcase here: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/showcase), and Tome
- Create and manage rich content using the Bricks module. It offers a new way of building pages on top of Entity Reference, Display Modes, Layout API, tabledrag.js and Flat Tables
- The session about Bash was our favorite!
We are looking forward to next year’s Midcamp event!
PS: Do you want to join our team as a Senior Full Stack Developer? We are hiring!