July 2019 Meetup

Content systems architecture: approaches in a decoupled world by Dominic Laycock

Ten years ago, architecting content “systems” involved software solutioning and scaling the infrastructure to handle more traffic. DevOps meant “add Jenkins.” Enterprise-level development work generally required a week or two of architectural deliverables, even when third-party services were involved.

Today, the emerging content systems landscape requires a systems approach. As Head of Content Platform for The Economist, Dom and his team built a reactive microservices platform, between the original Drupal site and the new React front end. Then continued to evolve the multi-platform architecture as a whole, with a canonical content model at the center.

The difference between legacy and modern content systems is as conceptual as it is technical. Architecting emergent systems requires an evolution from strategic planning to collaborative strategic thinking — everyone seeing the parts through the lens of the whole.

What are the critical components of designing for emergence?  In this talk we will share some approaches for building modern content systems, from concept to implementation strategies, and the role that technology leaders play in this process.

Attendees will likely have enough familiarity with content systems to benefit from this talk. They will leave with conceptual tools for collective design of emergent systems that integrate multiple platforms and purposes.

Bio

Dominic Laycock has engineered and led teams through three major content system transformations: custom ColdFusion software through enterprise open-source CMS development into an event-driven microservices distribution platform. Previously Head of Content Platform at The Economist, he is now co-founder of Mentrix Group, a system design and development consultancy.

Extending dependency injected core classes by Father Shawn

Drupal 8 introduced many of us to dependency injection. When extending core classes that follow this pattern, most of us simply replicated what we saw in core. Shawn learned in Seattle that’s not what the core developers intended. He will share the intended pattern, which makes use of a seemingly impossible PHP “feature.” The added bonus is this pattern also prepares your custom and contributed code to be ready for Drupal 9.

Bio

Father Shawn has been developing solutions with Drupal since 2009 and is an active member of the Druapal NYC community. He is married and has two young adult daughters. He and his family are proud residents of Brooklyn, New York. He is also an active contributor to Drupal, both through contributed modules and bug fixes to core. Outside of Drupal, Shawn is an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church. He enjoys computer gaming, and recently began learning to fly fish.

Drupal on Kubernetes: An Example by Jim Bartus & Jeremy Chase

In this talk we'll do a live demo of a basic Drupal install on a Kubernetes cluster. While it's running, we'll walk through the underlying components step by step showing how they're put together. This should serve as an introduction to Kubernetes concepts within the context of what they mean to Drupal.

Bio

Jim & Jeremy are devops consultants and the co-founders of lamp.io.

Summary
  • Content systems architecture: approaches in a decoupled world by Dominic Laycock
  • Extending dependency injected core classes by Father Shawn

  • Drupal on Kubernetes: An Example by Jim Bartus & Jeremy Chase