Before I dive into the conference a note on the city Barcelona.
What a city, it has mountains you can hike, beaches to lay on (and run), waves to surf and bikes to ride trough the city. I could easily write a separate blog post about how nice it was to be there. I'll keep it at three tips:

Ride the donkey republic bikes they're a great way to travel the city.
Walk/Run by the beach in the morning ( or play volleyball there if you can ).
Hike in the forests around Matadepera (there's some good climbing there too) or visit Montserrat.

On to the conference after some pictures:

Barcelona atmosphere

The intro session by Christina Chumillas was really cool and gave a nice introduction to Spanish habits.
Debunking myths about Barcelona and Spanish people (like the Siesta and also which food is from which region) , I wish every conference did that.

Drupal & AI
It's great to hear Dries's Buytaert enthousiasm about AI in Drupal.
Some cool things from his keynote:

Now we have AI priniciples (Human in the loop / Transparency / Swappable models / Responsible AI)
The Starshot demo showed adding fields in Drupal like "Add an image field on the article please".
Migrating your existing website from whatever to Drupal with AI (without writing code).

It's great that we are active in this space and that it's importance and transformativeness(is that even a word) is recognized like this.
I've added the video below if you want to see the keynote.

In the Driesnote Dries showed some really nice AI agents interacting with Drupal core components. They are groundbreaking and for some even unthinkable. He poined people to attend the AI clarification session.

Calibrator Frederik Wouters (co-maintainer of the AI module) was in this session where we explained how the AI module came to be and what it consists of. The session was super popular (the big aula was really full). We tried to tackle some questions of the audience but had to leave so many unanswered. We're going to post more answers in a article or blogpost later on.

We also did a BOF where interested people could ask more questions.
Lots of questions were asked on how to create a provider or how the assistants work.
I'll write about this more in the coming months.

Every year some people write about the decline of PHP and Drupal but the opposite seems true.
I hear more people are coming from Javascript ecosystems and its neverending "Yet another javascript framework" to PHP.
PHP has been running more than 79 procent of the INTERNET (try to get that in your head).
The Wordpress community is trembling to its foundations (there's a conflict going on with lawsuits).
Drupal is stable, continuing and we'll gladly adopt the people that come for a long term site building experience.The drupal motto "Come for the software, stay for the community"resonates more than ever.

Dries's enthousiasm about Starshot (now Drupal CMS) has not waned. And I think rightly so.
If Drupal recipes delivers on it's promise, a lot of site recipes will be created and Drupal will become accessible to even more people. Also, with webassembly it will be easier than ever to start up a Drupal system.

I'm sceptic about Starshot (now Drupal CMS) but it has certainly the potential to be as good/popular as D7 was in it's prime.

Why Starshot?

Starshot make Drupal easy to use and available for non technical people (like marketeers or site builders). It's a continuation of the no-code approach to application building that drupal has since it's early days.

Ambitous goals!

Dries also expressed the ambitous goal for Drupal CMS. It would be done by the end of the year, that's also why Dries freed up his agenda to work on it himself. He has also a large team working on it too. I think Stef noticed correctly he has a renewed energy working on Drupal things.

To give you an idea on how ambitious the goals really are:

The next milestone is DrupalCon Singapore, taking place from December 9–11, 2024, less than 3 months away. We hope to have a release candidate ready by then.

The launch plan targets Drupal CMS's release on Drupal's upcoming birthday: January 15, 2025.

Drupal is back in the race

Stef De Waele

Initially I planned to write a review of a few sessions here. But that would make this page even larger and I already ecxeeded the planned length. Also Calibrator Stef has made an extensive list of the sessions that were attended with our scoring of it. If you're interested in which technical sessions we attended and which ones we recommend, it's best to take contact.

Calibrate is a Belgian Certified Drupal partner with the most code contributions. At Drupalcon we also join forces with other companies to do more contributing.

Calibrate was very active and present on this Drupalcon. We contribute a lot. This Drupalcon was no different. This article covers how we contributed this Drupalcon.

Calibrator Jonas made an after movie. You can consider this the Official Calibrate aftermovie. Hope you like it!

Calibrator Joris also took a lot of pictures and there's an official pool of pictures. Check them out too.

Photo credit Bram Driesen

Stef De Waele worded it so nicely: For him Barcelona 2024 was "the drupalcon of hope". There was/is an incredible positive vibe (not only around AI and Starshot but in all initiatives) and we are building immensely powerful features that might not even exist in other systems. Hold on to your chair because this open source system is not finished yet, 1100+ attendees of this conference will confirm this. Yours truly is happy to be a part of this.