As software developers, we know our software will fail; someone will use it in a way we did not anticipate, we will forget to properly check input, a process will time out, and we will make typos.

For these reasons, and many more, people spend time and efforts on reproducing problems, and finding and fixing root causes. If this hasn’t caused too much of a delay, there may even be time to make sure these problems never show up again.

It is inevitable. Or is it?

Drupal Answers is a quite popular destination for Drupal travellers built upon the stackexchange network of platforms and has been around and thriving for a long while. This talk will reflect upon a year of using the platform, presenting important points of consideration for a Drupal developer, for a Drupal enthusiast and for the Drupal community at large. To top it off there will be some musing on the probable conflict of interests with drupal.org as well as the case for synergism between the two.

In this 4 hour workshop you will learn how to carve your own path on the steep slopes of testing in Drupal.

Drupal has a long history of using automated tests to guarantee its stability and prevent regressions. Every new feature or bug fix that is added to Drupal core requires a test to prove that it works as intended. This practice is also adopted by most popular contributed modules.

The people who contribute to an OSS project are the ones shaping its future. But if you've never contributed to an Open Source project before, it can be daunting to submit your first pull request and become part of its community, especially if you're from an underrepresented group in tech. This might keep you from contributing in the first place, meaning your voice, experience, and opinions will be lost. What if you could submit a pull request with confidence, contribute your skills & experience, and become a meaningful part of a project?

Optimizing images can drastically decrease the page load time because on average 60% of a website’s page weight is made up of them. The number and diversity of devices accessing the web continue to grow so Responsive Web Design has changed how the web is built. And that includes images too, because the aim is to deliver the highest quality image supported and nothing more. So today we have new standard elements and attributes to work with images widely supported by browsers (and polyfills for the rest) and Drupal has incorporated them.

Is the future of content management decoupled? As marketers aim to reach a dizzying and expanding array of content channels and touchpoints, centralization around a single source of truth for content has never been more important. Recently, new tools known as headless CMSes providing content as a service, such as Contentful and Prismic, are challenging the monolithic architecture that has long characterized CMSes like WordPress and Drupal. What role do Drupal and traditional CMSes play in an increasingly API-first playing field and fragmented future?

As developers, we try to follow best practices in our daily work. One such best practice is internationalisation, a term that's used a lot in the ever globalizing world in which we live. However, it's often not fully understood or not used to its full extent.