 Mike, for this session, but I'm Bevan Wishart. I work at Catalyst IT. I've been working there coming up on nine years at this point. So I've been doing Drupal for quite a long time. And this panel discussion today formed basically from a discussion we had in the Australian Slack channel about Drupal South. And part of what I expressed was some of my experiences when sometimes you come out of a talk and you're like, hey, that was amazing, that was great. And then you get back into the real world and you sort of get hit with a little bit of reality that sometimes these amazing tools that you sort of come out with a concept that they're magical and they're going to change your life and you'll never have a problem ever again. And it's just not the case. And it also comes up that everybody's made mistakes. Everybody has their challenges. So that's how these panel forms of the idea of doing a talk along those lines of let's be a little bit vulnerable and tell some stories effectively. So I've put together a short little introduction, presentation to get this going. And then I'll introduce the panel. So going through here, basic premise of our talk today, whether I got statistics or facts to back that up, I don't know, but it's an opinion. Drupal is the best CMS in the world, right? But it is great, but it does come with challenges and we all know that, right? There's challenges you hit with. It is awesome. The reason we're all here at the moment is for Drupal, where we're all invested in Drupal in some form or fashion. We all come in different shapes, we come in different sizes. There's different people in different roles from different backgrounds and there's amazing community around Drupal. We all know that's what we come for the technology, the software we stay for the community. And there's a real good opportunity to take advantage of that. So there's some points that back up what I just said. All right, so Dries recently gave a presentation and this graph was presented about how beginners seem to struggle with Drupal, but the experts love it. And if you look at that graph, you can see that things improve as you go on, but if you look at this blue one for clear, clarity just kind of stays a bit low all the way across the graph. So even though when you say experts love it, there's still an expression of a bit of confusion, sorry. Yeah, right, but so on that point, Drupal has a dip and it's learning curve, right? So you come into Drupal, it's a little bit exciting and then you hit some challenges and it dips. So once you come out the other side, it starts to become a really useful tool and it parallels very much our own natural creative processes where you go into something, you learn a bit, it gets to struggle and then you come out and you sort of carry on on the other side. So there's that moment of it's genesis, it's like, hey, let's get into Drupal, let's use Drupal. And then you go through an assimilation process where you really start to understand it and get a grasp of things and eventually you come outside and you've got a sense of mastery, I suppose, and you start to really enjoy the process. Now, where are we? There's, same point, even the experts experience and some challenges, so there's often decision-making processes, like when I'm building this site, what tools, what modules are not gonna use, how am I gonna form the classes, what project management style am I gonna use? So there's all these questions come up. So even the experts are having challenges and these kinds of questions, it happened from the entire stack, right, from basic how am I gonna write this class all the way through up to grand strategic ideas of how we're gonna get through that process. So before I introduce the panelists, a lot of these problems that we've got with Drupal, there are a lot of technological solutions coming through the pipeline. So in the next few years, there are gonna be technical solutions to a lot of these challenges and part of this is how do you deal with that today, right? There are solutions coming, but on a day today, when you go back to work on Monday and you're there, you're gonna face some challenges, how do you deal with that? So the panelists here today, we've got Lee Rollins, he's from previous next, I think those few would have heard of him before. I definitely have, of course, I'll speak to him on the Slack channel and OZNZ. I wanna point that out. Every single one of the panelists here is regular contributors to the Slack Australia and Z-channel. So that's their panel of the same. Drupal's strategy's open, so they've all very experienced Drupalers here. Adam, senior Drupal developer, I've worked with before, again, Slack with, chat with on Slack quite a bit and Ling who worked together a bit over the years and a bit more recently. So I've brought them all here just to sort of be able to give their insight into some of their daily challenges, mistakes they've made, how they overcame those and have a little bit of fun with this as well. So the whole point of this is a Drupal Confession Panel, so it's Confession Time. Before we run into that, I just wanna do a little bit of some values around that confession because we wanna have a little bit of structure. I don't wanna turn this into a big, big bitch-fest and pointing fingers. So first thing, I want you to tell the truth. Like, yeah, I'm gonna get some audience involvement, I'll explain how that works in a moment, but really come in and tell the truth. If you've made a mistake, if you've done something really stupid once upon a time, let us know. I've got confidentiality, I don't know, this rule we filmed, so there's that, but I'm gonna use slide.o, which you can post anonymously, so there's a bit of confidentiality when I've got pointing fingers at who did what. Some self-responsibility, respect for people in the room that are gonna say things and come in, and by all means, have fun. That's a big part of what we're here to do today. So, for the audience participation, I've set up a Slido thing, so usually in these talks, everyone goes, can you turn your phones off? I'd ask you to get yours out, please. If you go to slide.do and enter the Drupal Confessions in that there, you can then go and put some questions in there. I'll post the questions in the prompt that's up in a moment, and then you can vote on them. We can put them to the panel. We can have the panel actually answer some of those questions themselves as well. So, to give you a bit of help, that's my favorite question, the top one, what did you do? I know I do this with people I work with sometimes, they come over and ask for help, and he's like, what did you do, right? So some of that. And we sort of have been having fun and being a bit serious. So, what are some things in Drupal at the moment or technical challenges you're having, you know, business and strategic challenges you're having as well? What's not working for you? What's the most frustrating thing you're experiencing at the moment or have done? What was the most frustrating thing you had to deal with as a Drupal user, expert developer, et cetera? And then some fine ones at the bottom. What's the silliest mistake you ever made, you know? And what misconceptions have you had? You know, I know there's times where I've been using Drupal for a long time, and then realize that I've been doing something wrong for a period of time. So, to get that started, I guess, I've got plenty of stories. I haven't even written them down because I've been toasting them up here at the moment. I did a talk a couple of years ago on configuration, whereas I was writing in the store profile and Drupal 8 was fairly new and I was getting my head around configuration. I don't know, I was doing a lot of putting stuff into the fault content and copying it around, and that was a big, like, became very unmanageable down the track of it. That same project, we also did a lot of media and video creations where I created my entities for that and then someone's gone, well, I didn't use the media module. And it's just like, yeah. It was a good point and it was too late at that point. So, and that project's still alive and we're still managing, still dealing with managing these entities I created myself. So there's a bit of confession of mine that was, in hindsight, that was the really obvious thing to not do. So there's my confession for you guys. So, if you guys can go to the slide I owe and post some questions up there. And there's some good ones here already. But while we're here, I might get the panel to, if you feel so compelled. Is that better? Yeah. I was just thinking about, actually, one of the biggest mistakes I think I still make is spending like three or four hours setting something up and then realizing after the fact that there's a control module that does it for you. And I just did that, like maybe a few months ago, with entity embed, media embed, like all the media stuff. I spent hours clicking around, trying to figure out where to go. 70 million settings, like entity browser views, all this stuff. And then I found the module that previous next did the PNX media or whatever it is. And I was like, oh my God, the whole thing could have been done by just enabling a single module. I felt really stupid after that. One thing that I'm guilty of all the time is chasing a bug without updating the module first. So I'll get down a rabbit hole. I'll get down a rabbit hole, I'll open up the debugger and I'll find the bug. And I'm like, yes, I've got this. I know what this is. And then I'll go to open an issue in the queue and then I'll find that someone's already opened it. It's already fixed. And if I had it just updated to the new release, I would have fixed it. So I'm pretty guilty of that. And I think one thing that I wish I had known sooner was that you're not alone. So I'm like in regional Australia and I spent a good two and a half years, I'd say battling Drupal on my own without realizing there were all these people like you guys out here. And Syme Hobbs introduced me to IRC and like that completely changed everything. So if you're not on, if you don't use the Drupal Australia Slack channel, I think that's your homework from today. Is to join that. You have a slide for that, right, Bevan? Give a slide for it at the end. I do. Yeah, so yeah, like if you've made connections while you're here, like you continue them when you go back to your job. So what Bevan said about, you know, you saw these amazing things when you get to back to reality. Yeah, just trying to battle it on your own. There's a lot of ways to do things in Drupal and there's like many ways to skin a cat and sometimes the only way to learn that the way you thought was right is not right. He's like through tears, right? Through having Sam pointed out in public channels. Yeah, so like, and if you know someone who's already been through that and already got tears, that makes it a lot faster because you just like learn from their pain. So yeah, that's my, I wish I had have known that sooner. I think my biggest Drupal confession is probably I built a system for basically exporting and importing content from code. And then I left the company and realized what I built them was absolutely terrible. And now they're stuck maintaining it because I don't want to maintain it. I also did a talk on it and it was, in hindsight it was really like a proof of concept but I don't know how many sites I've got running on it now but yeah, I feel sorry for ever maintaining that now. What do I wish I did sooner? I had one but it's completely gone now. Okay, keep me coming back to it. The most thing I learned from Drupal is I have to join a community like Lisa. Sometimes years ago I just spent hours, hours and days trying to figure out one thing and if you just pop in the community, ask the question, always people help you. And the most time it's very simple. It's like sometimes ask Lee, oh, how is this not working? And he just said, did you clean the cache? I really had a piece A for piece paper that has clean the cache hanging under my wall. That's really important. Yeah, so yeah, learning from the community is very important. Something that I wish I did earlier was, and I suffered a lot from this, especially earlier in my career, was ignoring and trying to understand what Drupal is actually running on and how things actually work under the hood. The last two years I've kind of been getting more into the operations side of things and I think even having like a basic understanding of how your site's actually operating under the PHP level that you're actually writing is extremely important and has helped me architect my projects better and more efficiently and I think that's a really important thing that a lot of people sort of leave on the side. Yeah, just continuing that theme, my first experience with Drupal was Drupal 4.7 I had some requirements to build a local government site and one of my colleagues said, just use Drupal. So I installed it and created some content and saw this node slash one and I thought, well, let's have a look in the node folder and see what's in this one file. And I couldn't find it and it was a mystery and I just went, this is rubbish. And I put aside and didn't use Drupal for, oh, maybe later on in Drupal 5. So that's kind of what Adam was saying. Like, yeah, understanding what's happening under the hood is really powerful and back then I was a single, you had a PHP file for everything or a HTML file for everything and yeah, it was complete black magic and I didn't understand any of it, yeah. Okay, excellent feedback. Thank you very much. You guys have contributed. Thank you very much. We've got top voted question up here which probably question that was in the back of my mind as well but hadn't quite formulated it. So I'm glad that's up here. I'm interested in the panel, got some answers to this which is what's something you should definitely know when it just popped down by one middle, it's done. What's something you should definitely know but you're still Google for the answer. Basically everything. Yeah, what makes it worse is when you Google it and you find a blog post that you or your colleague wrote two years ago. There's a blog post that Nick wrote that I just keep coming back to every time. Like I search for like, oh yeah, that's right. See we've all been there, right? This is, we use Slack custom messages as well a lot of the time to like, you know, remember hard and long and hard to remember commands and things like that. So you can set up like, you know, Slack custom responses where you ask it a question and it will give you an answer. Oh nice. Yeah. That's really, really helpful. That's, we use that for our update Qualcommite. I was just gonna say the thing, cause I don't do it that much but every time I have to run Drupal updates I have to Google the command to run because there's just no way that I'm gonna remember that. Yeah. I mean, I think build tooling is important. Yeah, like there's so many flags to Drosh commands that you're gonna get them wrong, right? Oh there's another one, Drosh ULI for not user one. Yeah, yeah, so every time you have, yeah, you gotta have like aliases and make tasks and things like that so that, cause there's so many flags to so many of those commands you're never gonna get them right, yeah. Okay. Here's a fun one, a confession. Has anyone on the panel ever hidden an Easter egg in the site and got found out and got in trouble? No. I do mostly government sites, so no. Maybe. Easter egg is in like a terrible bug, probably, yeah. Well, one time, this isn't an Easter egg but after the first Drupalgetin, one of the devs and I were like joking cause we knew one of the sites hadn't updated and he accidentally ran the vulnerability and basically hacked their site and then he was freaking out because he was like, oh my God, are they gonna be able to figure out that way? Yeah, on the same theme, when that Drupalgetin bug came out, I knew some local businesses that I built the sites for that I knew weren't getting active support anymore because they'd moved to another provider that wasn't doing that and wasn't up to date with that bug and I actually used that exploit to patch their site cause they were a friend of mine and I didn't have access to it anymore and to leave it or not, there was talk in the community of that someone actually wrote a bot that was doing that cause there were people who were going to patch their sites and found they were already patched so a nameless Good Samaritan may have actually automated that for a lot of the sites because... That's amazing! Yeah, because the reputation or fallout for that was huge, right? So, yeah. See how we're going here with... Well, this is an interesting question I'm hesitant to ask. When was the last time you wondered why you're not just building it in WordPress? I've never installed WordPress, ever. I've opened up the wp-login.php file and saw a switch statement and got the... I've never shut a browser tab faster. If everyone's not seen wp-login.php, it's all of their login and authentication and logic intertwined with the HTML that builds the form to login. So if anyone was doing PHP in, like, 2000, like I was, that's how you built stuff with PHP. You read it all in HTML and then you had all these PHP opening tags inside your page and you probably had some code at the top of the file that if there was a form submission, you were doing processing and WordPress login is still that. There's all of the logic around their authentication and all that is just intertwined with a big switch statement inside the form that renders the login form when that just scares the crap out of me, yeah. We still have a WordPress site and for some reason, clients do have one too, especially for the conference site and the reason that we just counted that we have up to 40 WordPress sites, I talked to my manager, maybe we need to move them away to the drivel. Yeah. It's because it's just the maintenance things and updates, you have to update all each different site. Yeah. Almost, I've had very little experience with WordPress. I think around the same time I was being introduced to Drupal, a friend asked me to build a WordPress page, you know, a WordPress site and I was a little bit lost, but I quickly had someone hire me to do some Drupal stuff and funny enough, it actually seemed an easier process. I think it just made a little bit more sense. It was easy to understand what was going on for the same thing. So I haven't asked myself that question for a long time. I've been doing Drupal for a long time, so I don't know much about WordPress itself, except for little bits where it's kind of new. So the next question voted up on here that hasn't already been covered is, how do you honestly explain the upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8? It's a complete rebuild. Yeah, it's a rebuild. It's not an upgrade. Yeah. It's a completely different site. Okay. And it's necessary. And it's necessary. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it's an opportunity to review your site and you know, the web is always changing and can you honestly say the site that you built five or seven or eight years ago is what you would build if you built it today? So that's the first question to ask. But in all honesty, the sites that I've gone from Drupal 7 to 8, what Adam and Pam said, they were rebuilds, but I've got a few small sites that I maintain that are getting to that point now where we're gonna have to do that upgrade. And I don't know if people are aware, but with Drupal 7 from 6, you ran update.php in Cross Your Fingers, but with Drupal 7 to 8, it uses the Migrate API. So the idea is you have one version of your site which is running Drupal 7, and then you have another version of your site, which is a Drupal 8 site, and you go to upgrade.php and you hit the button and you see what happens. And so the Migrate team have done a lot of work to make sure that there is actual migration paths for a lot of the stuff you'll find in core. Your mileage will obviously vary for Contrib, but the first step will be to run that and see how broken things are. So if you've got custom modules, you're gonna have to rewrite them. If you're on a like GovCMS style platform where you can't have custom modules, that's probably in your favor. You're gonna need to upgrade your theme regardless because there's things that you have to do differently. But the first step is to see how much stuff is broken. And if anyone's like here today, like Victoria is a Migrate maintainer, she's at the conference, she was at the Code Spring. She's actively working on a lot of that stuff and has done a huge amount of work behind the scenes where they basically take the Drupal 7 site and your fields get migrated, your content types get migrated, your views get migrated, like all the stuff that's in core, like there is a migration path for, the only things that are not working in core are the multilingual sites, which is for the IE18N module in Contrib. But they've done so much work. So I think if we talk about like, start again and that's probably good from a business point of view, but from the amount of effort that's going to that, there's a lot of functionality in there. Yeah, I think it doesn't have to be like a start from scratch. Like you can do a sort of tiered approach where you see what's broken and then I think that's a really good opportunity for clients to re-evaluate their website and really think about, okay, do we actually need this stuff and can we do it a better way and can things get consolidated to make our site easy to maintain or easy to use or whatever. So while migrating everything over might seem appealing, I think it's good to step back and think about how you can make your site just better in general. Yeah, and just to reiterate on the message that came from Bevan earlier and from Ling, is that like we're a community of people, right? And Victoria, we're lucky that she's in our time zone, she's in our community. So, you know, if you're having issues or you've done something posted in the channel, people might have already gone through that. Someone might be able to point you to something that you didn't know about. Yeah, just don't suffer in silence on your own. From the content preview, you have no choice. Can't be lazy, you can't copy one for the bunch of the old documents over to one site to another site. So it's time to clean it up from Drupal 7 to 8. You have to get rid of all the old contents and all the files and don't carry them over. You just have to do it, can't be lazy. It forces you to do it. Yeah, so, I mean, Ling speaks from experience there. They've been through this process with Charles Darwin, you know, yeah. So they had a lot of Drupal 7 sites and effectively they've brought on subsections of their Drupal 8 site and as they've done each subsection they've audited their content and thrown away the stuff that was no longer relevant or improve the stuff that could be improved. And I think that's really wise words of advice from Ling there, yeah. Okay, thank you for that. Well, while you've been talking, there's another question just shot right to the top. So, and I think this is a good question myself, which is what's one quadruple module you installed and then you regretted the decision that still causes you pain? Rabbit Hole. Which one? Rabbit Hole. Okay, yeah. That name tells you, like that. No, I just don't like it. I just wanted to say on that note and it kind of circles back to some of the stuff we were talking about before. I think as developers, like, we tend, or site builders or whatever, we tend to, you know, there's a module for that and store it and hey, it solves my issue and away we go. And that can be really good, but, you know, it's really important to start, like, getting into the habit of actually looking at what is happening in that module, looking at the code and seeing what it's actually doing, because, yeah, some things can get pretty hairy, pretty fast if you're just piling on modules after modules. For me, it would be the Node hierarchy module in Drupal 7. And if you want to know why, ask me where my DrupalCon Sydney went, where my Drupal South Melbourne went. That module caused so many issues for me on a large site and I don't ever recall in all of my history of Drupal ever having mass, like, widespread database corruption just from content editors. Like, yeah. Yeah, we worked on the same site. We had a different one. Field collection. I once, the day before a site was going live, I was like, I'll clean up all the users that were test users. So, you know, go through. Obviously, everyone knows now, I'm sure, when you do it in bulk, it automatically deletes them and their content. And what it ended up doing was it, I deleted all the test users in bulk, so deleted them and all their content, which effectively deleted every field collection on every Node the user ever saved. And this was in production the day before the site went live. So, I remember, like, just going completely white and thinking, what am I gonna do? I messaged Lee, he had, like, magically just copied the production database to staging, like, two hours before. And then the two of us spent the next, like, three hours going node by node and recopying every field collection. I can't believe you don't remember this. If this is the same site I think you're talking about, that actually read its head in the migration to Drupal. As well, the same data integrity issues. And I'm looking at Gibran, I didn't, yeah, he... And that was seven years ago. Yeah, no, but, yeah, I don't remember it, I'm sorry. I'm glad you don't remember it. It's one of my great shames. I was gonna say views as well. I mean, it was worse in Drupal 7, obviously, but I think, like, it can just cause so much pain, just, and so much joy. I'm normally very careful to use the contributor module, always check the state and statistics, how many sites to use, and how active the maintenance do, and go to Google, Google is my friend, and find the training video, and if I feel safe and tested, then go for it. Webform. Webform is the greatest module that was ever created. Both seven and eight. Excellent, okay. I think we've got quite a bit of time, so one or two more questions can come down the line. There's one here that's getting voted up some more, which was, what would be a recommended pathway to mastering Drupal for new devs jumping on the platform? I can talk about what my experience was, and I was talking to someone about this yesterday who said the exact same thing, is to think of where you've seen what you're trying to build before, and because it's open source, just go and use that as a copy. This was Ivan from WebWash, we were talking about this, and yeah, so I can, I remember when I first started, I did a lot of work around Ubicart, and a lot of work around, it always required these really complex forms that had table-based layouts, and every time, this was before we built admin user and admin content with views, and it would, well, I've seen this pattern before in think where you've seen the same thing, and just have a read of what the code's doing, and copy and paste it, and modify it from there, and yeah, but in my ariely days, it was very much a lot of what does this button do? So modify the code and see what breaks, and then learn from that, yeah, but I think the best way to get involved is to actually contribute. I think I could qualify my Drupal career into before I started contributing and after, and there are so many parts to Drupal that you can't know everything, and I think the sooner you accept that, the better, but the reality of it is throughout all of the ecosystem, there's people who are experts in their specific niche, and if you help contribute to that niche, they're more than happy to convey that knowledge to you, and so there's an excellent blog post that I linked some people to yesterday by Angela Byron, it's called Embrace the Chaos, so if you search for WebChick, Embrace the Chaos, and it's basically a tale of two developers. One developer is Sloppy Sam, has an idea for something, throws a patch up and says, what do you think people, and it's got no tests and doesn't meet coding standards, it's just a rough idea, and the other one is Perfectionist Pete, and he has a great idea and he spends three days coming up with the NT relationship diagrams and does everything like that. In the time he's taken to do those three days, someone's seen it and reviewed it and provided feedback, and Sloppy Sam's learned from that, rolls up a new patch, meanwhile Perfectionist Pete's still off coming up with the ultimate design, and anyway, read the blog post, but as long as the short of it is, through this process Sloppy Sam learns a whole lot, and because there's consensus and community activity around that, that's the patch that gets in. By the time Perfectionist Pete's finished, he goes to upload the patch and realize that it was already fixed yesterday and he's wasted five days or whatever of time, so yeah. Not the less than I thought it was gonna be. No. Yeah, I'm 100% Sloppy Sam, and people I talked to yesterday that said they'd worked on a patch and it wasn't finished, and I said, put it up, put it up, right? Because in our time zone, a lot of people in Drupal community refer to us as Code Fairies in the night, because they put stuff up and they come back the next morning, and because it's time zones, we've pushed that along a little bit further. If you work in a collaborative approach, you know, you learn from that other person, whereas if you kind of try to do it on your own, you don't get any of that expertise, so I think there's a lot of people in the Drupal community who would honestly say that they got their computer science education in the issue queues. Yeah, I'll sort of add to this a little bit. I like that Embrace the Chaos is an element of Zen, I think, to the development process, and that's part of what this talk, thank you, it's partly what this is about today, is sort of to express that everybody's having challenges and that some things are hard, but just get out there and do it and keep going and recognise you said, oh, you're not alone. There are people you can reach out to, but generally you're not the only one in that boat, right, so that's part and parcel of the job, don't freak out about it. I'll openly admit that there were things about PHP, I've been doing PHP since 2000-ish, and there were things about PHP I did not know until I started contributing to Drupal A. I didn't know what an interface was, I didn't know any of the object-oriented code, I didn't know anything about surface containers and any of that, but I learned all of that through reading other people's code and contributing to stuff, like I can't stress enough how much you can get out of it, and you have to let go of the, like this, you can't pretend that you know everything, you have to be prepared to fail, you have to be prepared to fail publicly, you have to sort of, you know, just put it out there and see what happens. If you're very guarded about that, then it's very difficult, yeah. Yeah, I think that's like, to add on that, it's like, yeah, you've gotta drop your ego and really just understand that there are a lot of other people that are smarter than you and you shouldn't say that as a bad thing, it's a good thing to, you know, embrace it and learn from them, and you know, for me, when I joined previous NEXT, working under people like Lee and Sam, all of us are here, you know, just learning so much from these people from, and a big part of that was, yeah, contributing back, and then even back when I very first started Drupal was chucked into the deep end to write a sub module for the revisioning module in Drupal 7 or 6, and yeah, it's just about that, like, chucking yourself in the deep end, learning from people, seeing what's out there, seeing how other things are done that are similar, and then just writing some code. Excellent. I think we do have time. They're turning up, my clothes will go pretty quick, so we've got time. There's another question that's come in and risen up to the top. Which would be interesting. What's the longstanding core issue that you most wish was fixed? There's an example here, allow query strings in your RLA aliases. That's open to... Oh yeah, there's a views operations caching bug, which is, yeah, no one would know about it until you start having edit-owned permissions and things like that. And I think, for me, yeah, most of it is around caching issues that I've started noticing are pretty common. I mean, it's a common problem and a lot of mod, like not only core, but also con-trip, custom, yeah, can really buy you. There are a couple of nasty menu bugs I've found in the last couple years that I very much wish were fixed, and I mostly wish I could help fix them, but I can't, so I'm just pestering other people to try to help me. But one of them is if you move a parent, if you move a menu link between menus, so if you move from the main menu side of the footer menu, it looks like all the children got moved as well, but then every time you save one of the child nodes, it bounces back to the main menu and goes to the top level because it has no parent anymore. So it's actually diabolical because it looks like it worked until you realize it didn't work, and then you have to change each one manually. So I really wish that were fixed. Yeah, on myself, there's a few issues around UIDs and tracking ID entities, which just seem to hang around. I feel myself sort of just frustratedly. It doesn't really cause me any issues, but it's really annoying. I find, because we pulled UIDs in and then we're still using serial IDs in places and part of me just goes, why? So that was a lot of the participant questions have come up. I might start wrapping this up a little bit now. I do have, I had an open question on here, but I think it might have come up a little bit, but I might put this out there again. If there's one thing you could impart on people in the audience today to help them, what would that be? We had this as a dev-specific question before, but generally across the whole panel, more of your broad experience as Drupal is, what's your encouragement you can give to people to increase and better their Drupal experience? I think just jump and slack and ask for help and someone will be there. Yeah, I think for people who haven't done it before or maybe feel shy because you don't know if you're asking a stupid question or you don't know, no one knows me, are they gonna help me? I think there are so many of us that have been in that situation, like even if it was years ago, we still remember what it was like and so we are eager to help if we can at all and so yeah, I would just say you're not alone, everybody struggles at times, don't be afraid to Google it, don't be afraid to ask for help. And the issue queue is useful, so if you have a bug to report, do use the issue queue, but if you just have like a question that you don't know the answer to or you just need help with something, definitely please come to Slack and chat with us. Yeah, I would say 50 maybe percent of the questions that the answers we provide in there aren't the answer, but who's the next person to ask? Because the community is vast and you can't know who's the expert, but you might know someone who knows someone, and so a lot of the work that happens in those channels is, oh, you need to ask that in the media channel, or you should go and speak to this person. So knowing what to ask is one thing, but knowing who to ask is another thing, and I think that that's one of the real benefits that that channel provides, yeah. Yeah, can't agree more than that, ask questions, because years ago I have a problem with the menu system, and I think that TIMC, remember, and I pop on the, that time I didn't use the Slack, another triple community channels, ask questions, and somebody just point me to the right direction. It's really helpful. Okay, thanks. So I'll jump over this one. It's a little bit of homework for you all. I think just to sort of, we're nearing the end of a conference, we're nearing the end of a year. So as people in the Drupal community for yourselves, it's a good time to sort of lock in and end the chapter, and sort of do a bit of a closing off and recognize where you've come. I think that's really helpful. It's good to know where you want to be, but also where you are, and particularly where you did come from. So there's some questions here you can go away and ask yourself, like, what have you already learned? Like, what didn't you know that you do now? What do you now do differently that you didn't do before? What have you actually achieved? Like, acknowledge that for yourself. What have you achieved? What have you built? What have you contributed? Because there will be something, find that. And have you actually acknowledged that for yourself? How far have you come? It'd be really helpful just to lock that in for yourself and be ready to go on to the next spot. And of course, what are you gonna do next? Answer that for yourself. You know, where's that journey going? So basically, if you want to continue this conversation, do you want to keep this conversation and keep getting this engagement, then go into the Slack channel. I've got a link up there for you. It's on posters around here. Find it, get in there. Talk to the people in the channel. Do we have 300 members? It was 296. 296. 296. 276. Oh yeah, come on guys, you can do this right now. Who's not in there? So I've put my name on there, but you'll find that everybody's got tags, but they've got pictures. It's really good. It's one of my favorite things actually about coming to Drupal South is getting to be face-to-face with people that I'm chatting to regularly. So yeah, all of us are on that Slack channel and we reiterated it. It's one of the best resources available. I regularly get in there and ask what I consider really stupid questions, but I ask them and I get answers most of the time. But really, sometimes you've got to be vulnerable. I go in there and I just feel like I really should know the answer to this. I don't even know if it's the right question to ask. I feel stupid. And I'll ask the question anyway. And get an answer and go, whoa, I just saved hours of time and frustration just went away. Sometimes it's not even necessarily like, what's the answer? It's like, what do you guys think? What have you done before? What issues have you come across? So it's not necessarily like, I have this giant problem and I need a solution. It's more like, what experiences have you had, have you used this control module before? Did it cause any issues that you didn't foresee? All those kinds of things, it's not always sort of like debugging or troubleshooting, but just like general advice and shared experience. Yeah, and one thing I've tried to stress to people, if you do direct message someone with a specific question, they may route you back to the main channel and that's not because they don't wanna talk to you individually. It's because if you have that conversation in private, no one else benefits from it. And it's also because the person you ask might have a different opinion to someone else. And if you're asking the channel, you might get three differing views and even the person who answered the question the first time might learn from the person who answered with the second thing. So yeah, I think the golden rule of open sources, conversations have to happen in public and that like, yeah, it's good. Okay, thank you very much. Si, what are we up to? Well, thank you very much. Thanks for your contribution.