Talks

As part of working in Acquia’s Office of the CTO, I’ve been working on the API-First Initiative for the past year. Where are we at? Find out :)

Preview:

In my job at Acquia, I’ve been working almost exclusively on Drupal 8 core. In 2012–2013 I worked on authoring experience (in-place editing, CKEditor, and more). In 2014–2015, I worked on performance, cacheability, rendering and generally the stabilizing of Drupal 8. Drupal 8.0.0 shipped on November 19, 2015. And since then, I’ve spent most of my time on making Drupal 8 be API-first: improving the RESTful Web Services support that Drupal 8 ships with, and in the process also strengthening the JSON API & GraphQL contributed modules.

In the process, I’ve learned a lot about the impact of past decisions (by myself and others) on backwards compatibility. The benefit of backwards compatibility (BC). But the burden of ensuring BC can increase exponentially due to certain architectural decisions. I’ve been experiencing that first-hand, since I’m tasked with making Drupal 8’s REST support rock-solid, where I am seeing time and time again that “fixing bugs + improving DX” requires BC breaks. Tough decisions.

In this talk (which will be a core conversation at DrupalCon Baltimore), I analyzed the architectural patterns in Drupal 8, and provided suggestions on how to do better. I don’t have all the answers. But what matters most is not answers, but a critical mindset going forward that is consciously considering BC implications for every patch that goes into Drupal 8!

Not thoroughly considering new interfaces (API surface) risks making the software unmaintainable!

Preview:

Hasselt University Professor Frank Neven asked me to come and talk a bit about my experience in open source, and how it helped me. It helped me during my studies, in my career and even in life :)

Preview:

Did you know that often the majority of the time spent generating a HTML page is spent on a few dynamic/uncacheable/personalized parts? Pages are only sent to the client after everything is rendered. Well, what if Drupal could start sending a page before it’s fully finished? What if Drupal could let the browser start downloading CSS, JS, and images, and even make the majority of the page available for interaction while Drupal generates those uncacheable parts? Good news — it can!

This is where Drupal 8’s improved architecture comes in: it allows us to do Facebook BigPipe-style rendering. You can now simply install the BigPipe module for Drupal 8.0 and see the difference for yourself. It has been included in Drupal 8.1 as an optional module (still marked experimental for now).

In this session, we will cover:

• The ideas behind BigPipe
• How to use BigPipe on your Drupal site
• How Drupal is able to do this (high-level technical information)
• How you can make your code BigPipe-compatible (technical details)
• What else is made possible thanks to the improved architecture in Drupal 8 (ESI etc.), without any custom code

(We start with the basics/fundamentals, and gradually go deeper into how it works. Even non-Drupal people should be able to follow along.)

This talk covers everything in BigPipe (the webinar I did a few weeks ago was only an introduction).

I’ll let the webinar summary speak for itself:

Did you know that the majority of the time spent generating a HTML page is spent on a few personalized parts? Pages are only sent to the client after everything is rendered. Well, what if Drupal could start sending a page before it’s fully finished? What if Drupal could let the browser start downloading CSS, JS, and images, and even make the majority of the page available for interaction while Drupal generates the personalized parts? Good news - it can.

This is where Drupal 8’s improved architecture comes in: it allows us to do Facebook BigPipe-style rendering. You can now simply install the BigPipe module for Drupal 8 and see the difference for yourself.

In this webinar, we will discuss:

• The ideas behind BigPipe
• How to use BigPipe on your Drupal site
• How Drupal is able to do this (high-level technical information)
• How you can make your code BigPipe-compatible (technical details)
• What else is made possible thanks to the improved architecture in Drupal 8 (ESI etc.), without any custom code

Acquia frequently does webinars and given my work on BigPipe, I was asked to present with Fabien Potencier (of Symfony fame). Fabien covered back-end performance in the form of profiling, I covered front-end performance, and really the intersection between front-end and back-end performance in the form of BigPipe.

• BigPipe
• Dynamic Page Cache
• Page Cache
• Varnish/CDN

Together with Fabian Franz from Tag1 Consulting, I had a session about Big Pipe in Drupal 8, as well as related performance/cacheability improvements.

I’ll let the session description speak for itself:

With placeholders (https://www.drupal.org/node/2478483) having just gone into Drupal 8 Core, BigPipe being unblocked now and actively making its way in, Render Strategies around the corner, and out-of-the-box auth-caching in CDNs + Varnish a true possibility on the horizon, those are really exciting times for Drupal 8 Performance. But there is even more …

Come and join us for a wild ride into the depths of Render Caching and how it enables Drupal to be faster than ever.

The Masterplan of Drupal Performance (Next steps)

Here we will reveal the next steps of the TRUE MASTERPLAN of Drupal Performance. The plan we have secretly (not really!) been implementing for years and are now “sharing” finally with all of you! (Well you could look at the issue queue too or this public google doc, but this session will be more fun!)

Learn what we have in store for the future and what has changed since we last talked about this topic in Los Angeles and Amsterdam and why Drupal 8 will even be more awesome than what you have seen so far.

Also see a prototype of render_cache using the exact same Drupal 8 code within Drupal 7 and empowering you to do some of this in Drupal 7 as well.

Get the edge advantage of knowing more

Learn how to utilize cache contexts to vary the content of your site, cache tags to know perfectly when items are expired and cache keys to identify the objects - and what is the difference between them.

Learn how powerful ‘#lazy_builders’ will allow the perfect ESI caching you always wanted and how it will all be very transparent and how you can make your modules ready for the placeholder future.

See with your own eyes how you can utilize all of that functionality now on your Drupal 7 and 8 sites.

Get ready for a new area of performance

We will show you:

• How to take advantage of #lazy_builders
• How to tweak the auto-placeholdering strategies (depending on state of issue at time of session)
• The biggest Do’s and Don’ts when creating render-cache enabled modules and sites
• Common scenarios and how to solve them (mobile sites variation, cookie variation, etc.)
• Drupal using an intelligent BigPipe approach (but a different one, one that is way more like Facebook does it …)

Get to know the presenters

This session will be presented by Wim Leers and Fabian Franz. Wim implemented a lot of what we show here in Drupal 8 and made the APIs easy and simple to use and made cache tags and #lazy_builders a very powerful concept. Fabian has prototyped a lot of this concepts in his render_cache module, introduced powerful Drupal 8 concepts into Drupal 7 and is always one step ahead in making the next big thing. Together they have set out on a crusade to rule the Drupal Performance world to bring you the fastest Drupal ever and with that trying to make the whole Web fast!

Frequently Asked Questions

• I have already seen the session in Amsterdam and Los Angeles, will I learn something new?

Yes, absolutely. While the previous sessions focused more on the basics, this session will also cover how to use #lazy_builders and custom render strategies to empower your Drupal to be fast.

• Will there again be a demo?

Yes, there will again be a nice demo :). You’ll love it!

• Is it even possible to make it even faster than what we have seen?

Yes :)

Drupal 8 has comprehensive knowledge about the cacheability of the things it renders. This opens new doors. Did you know Drupal 8 will be able to cache everything at the edge?

For sites with many mobile users (high latency due to network), global audiences (high latency due to distance) and performance-sensitive sites (e-commerce), Drupal 8 will be a huge leap forward.

We’ll be showing how easy and powerful it is using the CloudFlare and Fastly CDNs.

Cache tags

Instantaneous purging of all (and only!) the affected pages when an article is updated. No more manual purging by content editors. No more fiddling with URLs to purge. It all just works. Optimally.

Cache anonymous pages without any effort. On your own reverse proxy, and on many CDNs — thanks to standardized configuration.

This sounds nice, but that’s just the anonymous user case. What about authenticated users?

Cache contexts

The typical example: a shopping site, users categorized in groups according to interests, and a shopping cart.

Automatic caching of the entire page, minus the shopping cart, on the edge. Reused across all users in the same group. And, if the CDN supports it, even the shopping cart can be cached on the edge (and be kept up-to-date thanks to cache tags). Otherwise only thatneeds to talk to the origin (via AJAX, for example).

Cache authenticated pages without any effort.  On your own reverse proxy, and on some CDNs — thanks to standardized configuration.

Goals

• The caching concepts
• Demos
• BigPipe, ESI, hybrid rendering strategies
• A peek at the future: ServiceWorker

Update September 24, 2015: the fastest Drupal ever is no longer near, it is here!

Together with Fabian Franz from Tag1 Consulting, I had a session about Big Pipe in Drupal 8, as well as related performance/cacheability improvements. Fabian’s demo of BigPipe and other render strategies in the first ten minutes are especially worth watching :)

I’ll let Fabian’s session description speak for itself:

Come and join us for a wild ride into the depths of Render Caching and how it enables Drupal to be faster than ever.

The Masterplan of Drupal Performance

Here we will reveal the TRUE MASTERPLAN of Drupal Performance. The plan we have secretly (not really!) been implementing for years and are now “sharing” finally with all of you! (Well you could look at the issue queue too or this public google doc, but this session will be more fun!)

Learn what we have in store for the future and what has changed since we last talked about this topic in Amsterdam and why Drupal 8 will even be more awesome and why you don’t have to wait and can do it all in Drupal 7 right now with the help of the render_cache module (with some extra work).

Get the edge advantage of knowing more

Learn how to utilize cache contexts to vary the content of your site, cache tags to know perfectly when items are expired and cache keys to identify the objects - and what is the difference between them.

Learn how powerful ‘placeholders’ will allow the perfect ESI caching you always wanted and how it will all be very transparent and how you can make your modules ready for the placeholder future.

See with your own eyes how you can utilize all of that functionality now on your Drupal 7 and 8 sites.

Get ready for a new area of performance

We will show you:

• The biggest Do’s and Don’ts when creating render-cache enabled modules and sites
• Frontend performance pitfalls and why front-end performance is tied to backend performance more than you thought
• Why libraries[] are so great and why single CSS/JS files make trouble.
• Common scenarios and how to solve them (mobile sites variation, cookie variation, etc.)
• Drupal using an intelligent BigPipe approach

Get to know the presenters

This session will be presented by Wim Leers and Fabian Franz. Wim implemented a lot of what we show here in Drupal 8 and made the APIs easy and simple to use and made cache tags and #post_render_cache a very powerful concept. Fabian has prototyped a lot of this concepts in his render_cache module, introduced powerful Drupal 8 concepts into Drupal 7 and is always one step ahead in making the next big thing. Together they have set out on a crusade to rule the Drupal Performance world to bring you the faster Drupal ever!