Over A Decade with DrupalCamp Spain: A Report from Benidorm

I have been going to DrupalCamp Spain for a long time (my first time was Sevilla 2011!) and being from Portugal I have always been fascinated by the energy of the Spanish Drupal community and the effort they put into their events. It has always been one of the best mixes of Drupal—old friendly faces and new people joining from companies all around the country for Drupal, friends, and networking.

I keep thinking the Spanish Drupal camp is one of the reasons we can find Spanish talent in the best Drupal companies around the world: A true sense of community that helped their members to go further than they were expecting when they decided to join a couple of colleagues for their first time for a weekend somewhere with Drupal people.

In 2024, the Spanish Drupal Association (AED) chose Benidorm for the DrupalCamp location, and the setup was different than usual. The camp was hosted in a hotel where most participants chose to stay. This gave a very family vibe to the event without the need for everyone to move too much between the event location and where they were staying, and, in my opinion, it worked very well. Having everything in the same location—talks, networking space, sponsor area, coffee breaks and lunch, accommodation, and social events - allowed participants to focus only on the event and forget the traditional logistics involved in being away at a conference.

Benidorm had more than 250 attendees. Many were first-timers in Drupalcamps, and it just felt good to walk around and not know many people! The event was on Friday and Saturday, with dozens of talks in three parallel tracks for all levels and profiles.

Drupal CMS (forever known by Starshot!) was a big focus of the most attended talks, but the days were filled with new technical concepts coming into the Drupal world, use cases like the Benidorm city council's use of Drupal since 2005, and non-technical sessions that should always be on developers' minds—how to keep reinventing yourself and keep being attractive in a more competitive job market.

My session was on Saturday afternoon. I talked about Drupal and Cloud development environments, and my presentation was called “It does NOT work on my computer.”

If most of the environments where our Drupal sites run are remote (production and pre-production environments) why do we keep using local environments to develop our work? Local environments produce differences in application behavior and can negatively impact developer experience and collaboration between developers and other colleagues.

Cloud development environments (CDE) allow our development environment to not run on our local machine but in an environment more similar to production. I focused the talk on the platform I use the most (gitpod.io). It offers you a way to quickly launch ephemeral development environments ready to develop, where you can directly use the browser to navigate and edit the codebase, but provides integration with the most common IDEs (PhpStorm and VSCode) so you can develop as you are used to. You can try directly connecting to your repository, which is the most common option for many Drupal developers to work on core and contributed modules.

Video of the presentation will be available soon, but meanwhile, you can check the slides https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1sQ0JzTUkTJxWWidyYO9vr0nrtn_z2Mxf0ZvktJyno3U/edit#slide=id.p

“Este adiós maquilla un hasta luego” - This goodbye does disguise a see you later

By the end of the event, we had the usual social event (Fiesta de cierre) on the hotel's rooftop, and it was an opportunity to meet more Drupaleros, their colleagues, and their families. Many people chose to travel to Benidorm with their family so they could also enjoy the weekend getaway. It was a great setup for the farewell or the perfect see-you soon!

And the see-you-soon will not take long. Next April, we will have our second Drupal Iberia on April 4^th and 5^th. It will be the second time the Portuguese and Spanish communities will organize an event without borders, and this time, we will host it in the Spanish city of Caceres. More details are coming soon, but put it already on your calendars!

Next year, all the Drupal paths will also go to Santiago de Compostela, where Drupalcamp Spain 2025 will be hosted. Stay tuned for the date and more details coming soon!