Starshot

I presented my first ever Drupal 11 deep dive session at DrupalCon Portland 2024 last week. It turned out to not just be about Drupal 11 but also about Starshot and even about Drupal 12 thanks to the coolest future-proofing technology I announced in this talk. Unfortunately not all of the attendees fit in, that wanted to attend, as the room was standing space only and many turned around and left. But here we go!

I strongly believe in open content. I came to open source from open content 24 or so years ago. So in good tradition, I built this slide deck on slides.com in way that is easy to share and fork. You can create your own or present directly from my deck with my speaker notes. The content is licensed with a Creative Commons license. I'll keep updating this slideshow, but under different URLs, so people can catch the latest edition of this presentation at Drupal Devdays Burgas next month for example. See some of you there!

If you can't make it there or plan to present this at your organization or meetup in the meantime, check out the open source slides.

The recording from DrupalCon Portland is below. Unfortunately I was not well prepared with a subtitling set up. I am exploring good tools and will do better next time! The conference tech crew tried to help in the middle of the session, but unfortunately they could not make it work either. At least managed to discuss some current Starshot questions while that was attempted. I promised a video with subtitles, which turns out Youtube nicely delivered, so I will not create a separate recording now. Hope this helps!

Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert just unveiled the Drupal Starshot Initiative and I couldn't be more excited! Starshot is all about putting users first. Enhancing Drupal core with additional components tailored to everyday users of the interface. Technically, it builds on Drupal core's robust foundation, utilizing Automatic Updates/Package Manager for seamless installation and maintenance, Recipes for the base system and on-demand additions, and Project Browser to help with recipe and extension discovery.

As I was talking to people about Starshot at DrupalCon Portland I realized it is easy to overlook how fundamental the changes proposed are in terms of how Drupal will innovate and the benefits end users will enjoy. At the same time those that did not have time to watch the whole keynote had understandable misconceptions about its nature. Some were concerned the fundamental changes are happening in the architecture, or a fork / parallel project is being set up. That is not where/how Starshot revolutionizes Drupal though. To address those misconceptions, I already worked on answers to frequently asked questions and published on the Starshot page.

This blog post will focus on the benefits that I see. I had the chance to participate in two hours of Starshot BoFs and then an hour long Q&A session at DrupalCon Portland. I also covered more technical details of Starshot's architecture in my Drupal 11 talk (including the most popular question on what the Launch button might lead to). Finally I had countless conversations with people at the event. Maybe confirmation bias, but there were only a couple people I talked to that were entirely skeptical. On the other hand I got very different viewpoints on what will the benefits be depending on who I talked to.

I think all of those are great, so I compiled them. Let's see 15 different reasons why I am super excited about Starshot and how it is very different from previous initiatives.