When we at https://www.jobiqo.com/ started our decoupled journey in 2018 the Drupal decoupled scene was new, very different and less mature than it is today. We found ourselves having to navigate very uncertain waters, not all was easy, but a lot of it was new and exciting and drove a lot of interesting times, personal development, struggles and yes maybe even some tears!
Today we can look back at past mistakes, good decisions, bad decisions, difficult decisions and implementations, great collaboration efforts and things we are not yet even sure were good or bad.
In this session I will go through the initial business (and technical) motivations to change jobiqo’s product which is a SAAS software for creating job boards from a very typical Drupal 7 architecture with a decoupled architecture using Drupal GraphQL and Next.js, what were some of the things we wanted to achieve with it, the risks we knew of, the risks we didn't know of, and analyse if we have delivered on those ideas today.
Doing a radical stack shift like this on a stable and mature product is no easy task, risks are involved, emotions are involved and a lot of buy-in needs to happen in all parts of the organisation (not just from developers) for it to truly succeed.
In this talk we can explore some of those risks and challenges such as :
- Time to market (and development time in general)
- Lack of knowledge from the team on specific flows / tools to be used
- Security and accessibility
And much more.. We also will touch on specific patterns you can find youself fall into that can be detrimental to the team's success such as
- Isolating backend and frontend development teams
- Working on silos for the sake of "separation of concerns" (spoiler alert, both work on the same concern)
- Lack of knowledge sharing
The session does not require any previous knowledge of any specific framework, just a basic understanding of the differences between a typical monolithic architecture and a decoupled architecture.
