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DrupalCamp Twin Cities: frontend wrap-up

2 Min. ReadEvents

This year’s Twin Cities DrupalCamp had no shortage of new faces, quality sessions, trainings, and after parties. Most of my time was spent in frontend sessions and talking with folks. Being that I live in Minneapolis, this camp is especially rewarding from a hometown Drupal represent kind of perspective. Below are some of my favorite sessions and camp highlights.

Training session: Advanced Sass and Compass

Pre-DrupalCamp, Ian Carrico led our Advanced Responsive Web Design training session, while I ran around the room helping folks with dev environment issues and/or questions. Overall, the training went extremely well, and we’d like to thank all attendees for coming along with us on a responsive adventure.

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The highlights: Sessions attended

Creating a Culture of Empowerment

Todd Nienkerk spoke about how we have created and continue to cultivate our company culture at Four Kitchens and how you can too.

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Tips and Tricks with Sass

Ian Carrico covered best practices and gotchas when using Sass, Compass, and talked about why we need Gemfiles & Bundler to make life easier.

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Beginners guide to Designing for Drupal

Ethan MacDonald (@ghanbak) spoke about how he leverages design pyramid methodology in executing and iterating his design process.

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Design Systems and Drupal: a unified worldview

Larry Garfield (@crell) discussed Palantir’s PRI project — case study style. He offered a high level overview of how they leveraged style guides and content structure to create design systems.

Layout Design Patterns

John Ferris (@pixel_whip) talked all about responsive grid systems. He touched on our favorite responsive grid system — Singularitygs; highlighting the difference between “isolation” and “float” based grids, and what makes intrinsic ratios so awesome.

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Backdrop CMS

Jen Lampton (@jenlampton) and Nathan Haug (@quicksketch) talked about their new Drupal 7 fork, called Backdrop CMS. It seems like a viable middle-ground option that seeks to lessen the effects of the radical changes in Drupal 8 and Drupal 7 as we know it now.

The afterparty

Friday evening, Advantage Labs kindly hosted an after party full of all-you-can-eat made-on-site brick oven pizza, snacks (some on a stick), and a whole slew of Minnesota-brewed beer.

Big thank yous

Thanks to Advantage Labs for hosting an awesome party and thanks to Ten7 for helping out. Thanks to all Twin Cities DrupalCamp attendees, volunteers, and organizers for making every year better than the last. It’s been a pleasure watching our local DrupalCamp grow over the last 4 years. I look forward to seeing new and familiar faces next year.