I’ll be at DrupalCon Chicago this year. It’s right in my back yard, so I really have no excuse not to show up.

I’ve been away from the Drupal world for about a year now. Most of my time lately has been focused on building Actual AI, working with AI tooling, and spending time in the broader JS ecosystem. All good stuff, but it’s meant that aside from continuing to maintain the API Client, Drupal has been in my periphery rather than front and center. I wrote a bit about how that happened in my last post, and honestly it still feels a little weird to have drifted from something that was such a huge part of my professional life for so long.

DrupalCon is a good moment to change that — to check back in with a project and community I care about, see where things have headed, and reconnect with people I haven’t seen in a while.

A few things I’m particularly curious about:

How the project is thinking about AI

This is the thing I’m most eager to dig into. I’ve spent a lot of the past year building with LLMs — building agents, wiring AI into personal workflows, working on Actual AI. I’m curious how Drupal is approaching AI integration, what’s landed, what’s still being figured out, and where the interesting open problems are.

Getting hands on with Drupal Canvas and code components

I followed along with early development, but I haven’t actually gotten my hands dirty with the stable release yet. I’m especially interested in experimenting with code components since the Drupal JSON:API Client is available out of the box for use in Canvas. This is likely what I’ll be focusing on during contribution day if anyone is interested in collaborating (or just wants to hang out.)

Sharing what I’ve been working on

Part of coming back is bringing back what I’ve learned. Building with AI day-to-day has changed how I think about a lot of things — how I prototype, how I approach problems, what I’m willing to attempt. I’m looking forward to conversations about what that actually looks like in practice, and whether any of it maps back to Drupal in useful ways. At a minimum I’ll have some strong opinions and wild demos to share.

A big thank you to MidCamp for providing my ticket. If you’re going to be there, come say hi. I’ll be the one who looks like they have forgotten how the LAMP stack works.