Team Axelerant At DrupalCamp Atlanta 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly changed the way we do things and connect with each other. But that hasn't affected the zeal with which DrupalCamp Atlanta is being conducted this year, just as it has been done since 2009. DrupalCamp Atlanta 2021 (#DCATL) is scheduled to be held between September 9 and 10, 2021 as an online event. This means anyone from any corner of the globe can register for it, as long as one has access to a stable internet connection.  

DrupalCamp Atlanta has transformed itself into one of the largest annual Drupal conferences in the southeast region of the US. It acts as a convergence point for students, developers, designers, experts, employers, and hobbyists interested in the exchange of knowledge and ideas through concurrent sessions, career summits, and hands-on training.

The diamond sponsors for this year's event are NewMe Media Inc and Esteemed.

Here is the list of session tracks:

• Being Human / People Operations
• Business Leadership
• Design, Theming, and Usability
• Development and Performance
• Education and Training
• Future of Drupal
• Marketing
• Site Building

From the list above, Being Human / People Operations, Future of Drupal, and Marketing have been introduced in 2021 to better align with the growing need in the digital workplace.  

We, at Axelerant, couldn't be more excited to be taking part in DrupalCamp Atlanta 2021, with four team members participating as speakers.

Team Axelerant's Sessions At DrupalCamp Atlanta 2021:

Bassam Ismail  Director of Frontend Services

Decoupling Drupal, progressively Session track: Development and Performance Room: Room 1 Starts at: Sep 9, Thursday 16:00 Duration: 45 minutes

There are a lot of Drupal features we end up missing out on when going fully Decoupled. In a lot of scenarios, only a part of our application needs the functionality that Decoupled Drupal provides, and going overboard ends up hurting us more than it saves our time.

Can't we have your cake and eat it too? Well, we certainly can when we decouple progressively. With such an architecture we get to enjoy the strong suite of both Drupal and the Frontend framework without worrying about how to scale our infrastructure or the team.

However, even with a progressively decoupled Drupal project, there are a lot of scenarios where we might run into challenges. In this session, I'll try to address some of them. We will go through the following:

• When to opt for progressively decoupled Drupal and how it compares to fully decoupled?
• How to structure your components and how various Drupal modules can make this simple for you?
• How to build components that work in harmony with Drupal localization?
• Which Frontend library should we use and when does it make sense to use something else?
• Optimize data fetching when querying data from Drupal and third-party APIs.
• Using Drupal for tracking Frontend errors.
   

Joshua Fernandes Drupal Engineer

Drupal Media :: Image Recognition :: AWS rekognition Session track: Development and Performance Room: Room 1 Starts at: Sep 10, Friday 15:00 Duration: 45 minutes

This session includes the interaction between the AWS Rekognition service to identify objects and faces in photos and the Drupal site using the Media Entity and Media Entity Image modules.

Functionality

• Upload images to Drupal
• Stream wrapper set to s3 bucket
• Cloud watch notifies lambda trigger
• Asynchronous task is run and data sent back to Drupal
• Data used in Drupal to set categories to the Images

Resources Used

• Drupal CMS
• Drupal s3fs Module
• AWS::S3::Bucket
• AWS::Lambda::Function
• AWS::IAM::Role

Putting it all together, Cloud formation is an amazing, seamless way to run an asynchronous task, reducing load on the main server. The way serverless is working is just amazing.

The next step, upload the code to Github, after making it more generalized. 
 

Shreyal Mandot Senior Drupal Engineer

Let's Write Secure Drupal Code! Session track: Development and Performance Room: Room 1 Starts at: Sep 10, Friday 13:00 Duration: 45 minutes

At times, the most important issue seen while developing an application is security and vulnerabilities, the knowledge of this is required for each and every individual from developer to QAs. This session is for everyone to have an understanding of the issues that arise while going to production or taking an application live. This session will give you knowledge of application vulnerabilities and the ways to fix those. One can fix an issue only when they know about its existence. 

This is for beginner to advance users, no pre-requisite needed.

Slides: 
Shreyal - Lets write secure code.pdf

Kunal Kursija Drupal Staff Engineer

PHP 8: String Helpers Session track: Development and Performance Room: Room 1 Starts at: Sep 10, Friday 10:00 Duration: 45 minutes

While building any web application, one of the prime data type that every developer has to operate on are Strings. These operations could be related to search, manipulation, or analysis of the strings, and these operations could be repetitive across various features of the web application. Such kind of repetitiveness has many risks and could prove costly if the operational code is not efficient.

This is a very basic problem that every programming language and the frameworks acknowledges it from time to time and solves it by abstracting such operational logic as helper functions to make developers life easy. PHP core provides many such helper functions around handling string operations and these functions keep getting updated from time to time and version to version of PHP.

In this session we will be focusing on few string helpers introduced in PHP 8 by covering the following topics:

• The need for abstraction
• Introduction to the new functions
• Demo

The problems solved by these new functions have been long overdue and hence, these string functions have been much awaited by everyone in the PHP world, and this session shall help you in learning everything about them.

Are you as excited as us about DrupalCamp Atlanta 2021? Because we are pumped! And we really hope to meet you there. Feel free to connect with Axelerant speakers and team members over Twitter/LinkedIn.

Wrapping Up

Axelerant is now hiring in Ethiopia, Taiwan, Costa Rica, India, the US, and the UK.

We are hiring across multiple service areas like Drupal, Frontend, Site Reliability Engineering, and Quality Assurance. We are also hiring for our Marketing, Sales, and People Operations departments. In short, Axelerant is currently booming with opportunities, so do check out our careers page. We offer progressive benefits like Home Office setup allowances, Health and Wellness allowances, flexible hours, and more.