Building and deploying sites using traditional Drupal approaches require developers with a large amount of crossover knowledge and expertise. Full stack developers are hard to find and training junior developers into this role can take years. Deploying Drupal sites at scale requires system and platform specialists that further extend the required knowledge base for a team to successfully deploy a Drupal project.
There are many reasons why Drupal is still a great tool for government, including security, role based work-flows, and a strong healthy community of developers, just to name a few.
In this talk I will present why the traditional approach to building drupal sites can be improved on by breaking apart your presentation layer from your data layer. As a manager this can have meaningful impacts on the skill sets required on your team and allow everyone to more narrowly focus their skills. I will also make a case why using a decoupled architecture may be considered a best practice approach to building and maintaining government sites going forward.
I will address several of the common concerns, and a few misconceptions, about building and deploying decoupled sites.
- Accessibility
- Development Experience & Tooling
- Front-end & Back End
- Docker based workflows
- Hosting & Deployment
- Docker & Containerized architecture for the win
- Maintenance & future technical debt
- Team role requirements
- CI, Testing, & Code quality
About Justin: Prior to being a senior developer at Amazee.io focusing on API and systems integration, Justin was a Drupal team manager in NY State developing and maintaining upwards of 50 Drupal projects. Justin has over a decade of Drupal and management experience with a foundation in software and programming.