From the birthplace of the original Industrial Revolution, a group of around 2000 intrepid EdTech practitioners and enthusiasts sought to examine and understand what has been dubbed the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution.’ I was fortunate to be among them for Jisc Digifest 2026 in Birmingham this week.
Birmingham: An 18th century canal sits under a 1960s communication tower nestled among 21st century mid-density residences
This was my first live Jisc event, and I was delighted to find that the organisers had thoughtfully arranged numerous opportunities for creative thinking and initiating engaging discussions with fellow attendees.
Perhaps my favourite element, the Jisc Hub at the centre of the main exhibition hall. It contained an interactive diorama of what appeared to be a student’s desk circa-2005, complete with an iMac G3, Rubik’s cube, and a fully-playable Nintendo 64. A form on the computer offered delegates to think about the changes in technology since that time and, by extension, what changes we might see on a similar timescale in the future.
I am grateful for the development of non-CRT computer displays
Adobe offered delegates a chance to design their own chocolate bar wrapper using the AI tools embedded in Adobe Express. Origami, jigsaw puzzles, and colouring in were available in the Community Hub area.
Far from being frivolous activities, these were opportunities to be creative, and to spark conversations with other delegates.
The conference kicked off with an inspiring keynote speech by climate activist Melati Wijsen. Since the age of 12, Melati has been a passionate advocate for environmental issues, having addressed audiences at the UN and Davos. Her compelling argument underscored the crucial need to include young people in our decision-making processes.
Daniel Liu from the University of Sydney provided a compelling case in allowing students to direct their own learning with AI tools. His case study showed examples of students generating their own self-directed learning tools using an LLM trained on their course materials. In seconds, they were able to generate pop-quizzes, simulations, and interactive graphics to supplement their learning experience.
Liu and many other speakers emphasised that we would do our students a disservice by denying access to these tools, and that it is the duty of educators to ensure that they are taught to use them effectively.
I was particularly interested to hear about the positive steps being made in digital inclusion spaces.
Elizabeth Newall presented a set of guidelines that Jisc has developed to assist transnational education (TNE) students and staff. This session was an excellent reminder of the considerations we must make when building our digital estates: for example, we might not think twice when uploading a large image file on one of our webpages over fibre-optic, but such an image might be a severe pain point for a consumer on a cellular-based internet connection.
Such considerations are of particular interest to me: as the Service Manager for the portal service, MyEd, I need to ensure that our services are as lightweight and responsive as possible in order to remain accessible to all of our users.
In a similar vein, I was interested to learn about the UK Government’s Digital Inclusion Action Plan. For many of us, completing tasks like paying for parking or filling in a tax form is made more convenient when done online. However, this is a source of enormous risk for the 8 million people identified by this plan – especially when the action can only be completed online.
It is my perception that AI in education technology is beginning to mature and that there is an increasing sense of surety around its potential. This was perhaps best illustrated by the collaborative art piece that was drawn in real-time over the course of the two days. Seeded with the simple question ‘What kind of future do you want to help create?’, a clear picture began to emerge of the exciting potential that these disruptive technologies could provide.
‘What kind of future do you want to help create?’
On the other hand, there are still fundamental questions about AI that are still outstanding, such as: ownership and sustainability of the hardware that AI relies on, the reliance many AI models have on consuming the intellectual property of others, and even the potential for AI to erode the very skills and qualities that make us human.
In perhaps my favourite session of all, ‘Inside the student experience: change, challenges and future hopes’, such concerns were echoed by a panel of student digital champions. They emphasised the importance of listening to student voices and involving them in the decision-making process at all levels. Their perspectives reinforced the notion that the technology of tomorrow must be developed not just with intelligence, but with wisdom and a deep respect for what it means to be human.
On the last weekend of February, I made the trip to Salford for DrupalCamp England 2026. It is only its second year, but already an event I have found myself looking forward to returning to. I came away with a notebook full of ideas, some genuine food for thought about the direction of AI, and a renewed appreciation for what these community gatherings actually provide.
I co-presented “Same Image, Different Story: Why Drupal Needs Contextual Architecture” with Tony Barker. The talk grew out of an investigation into AI-assisted alt text generation in Drupal. It evolved, specifically, from the discovery that properly accessible shared images aren’t straightforward to provide. Without sufficient contextual information, AI-generated alt text tends to be descriptive rather than meaningful. A technically correct description of an image is rarely the same thing as an accessible one. The talk illustrates this with a deceptively simple example: the same image can represent entirely different things depending on context, and the alt text should reflect that choice rather than just the image itself. The same photo of Shaun Ryder, for instance, could have been used because he’s the frontman of the Happy Mondays, because he’s from Salford, or because he was at the Brit Awards, happening just down the road that same day. Three very different reasons that each require a different alt text. The talk unpacks how an architectural gap in Drupal affects accessibility compliance, editorial workflows, storage efficiency, and media management across complex platforms. The discussions it sparked afterwards were well worth the journey south, with plenty of conversation around how AI could potentially be part of the solution.
Dr. Phininder Balaghan delivered the keynote, “The Augmented Future: Winning with AI,” and it set the tone for much of the day’s conversation. The central argument was a reframing: stop thinking about Artificial Intelligence and start thinking about Augmented Intelligence. The distinction matters. The companies genuinely winning with AI aren’t the ones that replaced their engineers with it. Klarna, being perhaps the most cited example, had replaced 700 employees with AI before quality declined, customers revolted, and they found themselves hiring engineers again. The productivity gains are real, but they flow to skilled people, not instead of them. Tools amplify human expertise; they don’t substitute for it. As someone building AI-assisted workflows here at the University, this framing resonated strongly. Though it’s worth noting that the human cost for those caught in the middle of these experiments is often more complicated than the optimistic retelling suggests, which made Antje Lorch’s session later in the day feel like a necessary and timely counterpoint.
With three tracks running in parallel in places, there were some tough choices to make throughout the day, and I’ll admit that on at least one occasion I found myself in a talk I hadn’t actually intended to go to, a hazard of being so engrossed in a conversation that I simply followed the crowd through the nearest door. But that’s arguably the point. Some of the most valuable thinking at events like this doesn’t happen in the lecture theatre at all; it happens in the corridors, over coffee, and in those animated discussions between sessions where ideas get challenged, refined, and sometimes born entirely. The fact that there were videos recorded and released later is something I am so glad about, not least to catch the sessions I missed, planned or otherwise. Antje’s talk was one of the casualties of that scheduling conflict, however.
As I said, unfortunately I didn’t manage to catch “We Need to Talk About AI” in person, but after the questions the keynote left rattling around in my head, it’s firmly on my watch list when the video appears. From the description alone it covers ground I think is really important: the environmental and energy costs of AI, the effect on global chip markets, and the implications for people in vulnerable situations who depend on services increasingly shaped by these tools. In an open source community that prides itself on values, this is exactly the kind of session that belongs at a DrupalCamp, and as someone actively building AI-assisted tools at the University, I think it’s worth sitting with those questions rather than just pressing ahead with enthusiasm. More to say on this once I’ve watched it, but it also makes me genuinely glad of the hard work going on to provide ELM.
A few other sessions worth calling out. James Abrahams showcased the Flowdrop UI for Agents module, a no-code visual AI agent builder for Drupal CMS that allows anyone to build AI agents, using an AI agent, which feels like a glimpse of where things are genuinely heading. If you’ve ever seen Jamie speak, you’ll know that his talks are as much an experience as a session, his passion for the projects he champions is infectious, and it’s genuinely hard not to get swept up in the enthusiasm. Whether the technology delivers everything he promises is a question for another day, but you’ll leave the room believing it will.
Maria Young’s session on keyboard traps, focus failures, and ARIA fixes was a practical deep-dive into the accessibility edge cases that catch even experienced developers off guard.
It was also great to spend some time with University colleagues during the day, Emma Horrell gave an update on Drupal CMS covering what’s shipped, what’s coming, and the UX research driving it, while Aaron McHale presented “Growing a Team to Transform a University Website” alongside James South from manifesto, covering their multi-year collaboration to deliver a new student-centred web presence for the University of Edinburgh, and one well worth sharing with a wider audience.
Beyond the sessions, it’s the people who make these events worth attending. Catching up with old colleagues, reconnecting with former clients from my agency days, and meeting new people who share the same passion for open source and the web. The conversations that carry on over a drink at the BrewDog social in the evening, for example, are often where the most honest and unguarded thinking happens. These are the moments that remind you why the Drupal community is something worth being part of.
Sunday for me was given over to the Drupal in a Day training session, which I helped facilitate. It is a structured, hands-on introduction to Drupal for newcomers, and a genuinely excellent format, and I’m already hoping to bring it to Edinburgh. The logistics of how to run it here are in progress, and the next step is making the case properly. I hope to be able to demonstrate its value and articulate the benefits for a local audience. Beyond onboarding our existing interns, I can see real potential in opening it up to prospective interns too, by giving candidates a meaningful taste of the platform before they ever apply. Those who engage well self-select, arrive already sold on Drupal, and hit the ground running from day one. It becomes less of a training day and more of a pipeline: attracting the right people and filtering out those who aren’t the right fit, before either side has made a significant commitment. And with DrupalCamp Scotland on our doorstep, there’s an obvious opportunity to run it there too, reaching an even broader pool of prospective talent while giving something back to the local community. Who knows, maybe some other staff members will want to get involved, too. Watch this space.
What started as a single day in Cambridge last year has grown into a full two-day programme, and the community energy that filled the venue was a reminder of why these events matter. If you’re a Drupal developer in the UK, or want to visit the UK, and you haven’t been to one yet, put DCE 2027 in your list of things to look out for next year.
Six months ago I joined the Web Development team at the University of Edinburgh. I know Drupal well, but I also know it’s like a huge bag of Lego bricks, its power lies in how those bricks have been assembled, and every codebase assembles them differently.
Testament to those who came before me, EdWeb 2 is a remarkable feat of engineering. One codebase running across over 160 environments, serving more than 600 subsites, curated by close to 1,600 editors. Getting up to speed quickly meant finding a way to navigate that complexity without getting lost in it.
When you’ve worked in Drupal for a while, you develop instincts. So when one of our environments started reporting slow load times, I had a hunch: somewhere, a block cache or menu cache wasn’t being set correctly, meaning every page visit was being built fresh from the server and database rather than served from a fast cached version.
The telltale signs were in the response headers for anonymous users:
x-cache: MISS, MISS, MISS, MISS and x-cache-hits: 0
I knew something was setting cache-control: max-age=0
A straightforward search of the codebase turned up nothing. This is where AI really earned its place. I described the problem, and the tool went to work scanning lines of code far faster than I ever could.
After several searches, we got there. A piece of code was, in certain circumstances, failing a check and returning false. When applied to the cache control setting, that false was being treated as 0.
This effectively switched caching off. The variable wasn’t being set to the wrong value; it wasn’t being set at all.
A targeted fix, a bit of defensive programming, and the problem was resolved. While AI helped locate the issue, the diagnosis and the fix were mine. Could I have found it manually? Eventually, probably. But describing the problem in plain language and having AI work out what to look for saved hours, if not days of scouring the codebase.
Of course, there’s no substitute for getting deep into the codebase over time, and that’s very much still the plan. But problems don’t wait for new team members to find their feet, and having AI as a tool to bridge that gap means issues can be tackled with confidence while that deeper knowledge is still being built.
I’ll be honest, I’m an advocate, but also a sceptic. I’ve been reading about the energy and water consumption of large AI data centres, and it’s hard not to feel conflicted. A data centre the size of Manhattan isn’t an abstract concern, there seems to be a real cost that sits behind every query.
The Drupal community has some vocal voices on this too, and I find myself nodding along even as I reach for these tools. That tension hasn’t gone away.
Part of that discomfort was closer to home than data centre emissions. Commercial AI tools had made themselves very easy to reach for, but reaching for them felt at odds with what I actually wanted to be doing. I knew ELM was the right choice, it just took more effort to get into my workflow. So rather than defaulting to the convenient option, I found myself holding back, using AI more sparingly than I might have otherwise.
The recent University’s AI Town Hall was exactly the energy injection I needed. A conversation with Andrew Hayward was the spark, hearing that others across the university were already making progress coding with ELM gave me the push to try again. Bart Pohorecki then pointed me to Codex CLI, which can be configured to work with an ELM API key, and a bit more digging led me to Codex CLI launcher built for PhpStorm. Suddenly ELM was running directly inside my IDE, with access to the codebase and no files being sent to unrestricted external services.
The result is a setup that feels like a genuine step forward: the productivity benefits I’ve come to rely on in my community projects, with considerably less of the guilt. Using a University-backed model feels meaningfully different, the privacy guardrails and University oversight address enough of the concerns that had been giving me pause.
I’m still at the early stages of exploring what ELM can do in this context, but I’m genuinely optimistic. If you’re curious about getting set up with Codex CLI and the PhpStorm plugin, feel free to get in touch, I’ll be happy to share what I’ve learned so far.
It’s also a reminder of the value of events like the AI Town Hall, tech conferences such as Scottish Web Folk, and community gatherings like DrupalCamps. They’re not just opportunities to learn what others are doing, they’re a way to recharge your own thinking and find the motivation to push past the inertia that can build up around good intentions and get some much needed excitement of experimentation.
Back in November (yes, I know — this post is fashionably late), I attended Drupal Camp Scotland on 7th November 2025. It was a full day of interesting, insightful and genuinely useful talks. From the moment I arrived, greeted by friendly faces over morning coffee – there was a strong sense of community.
As my years working with Drupal add up, I’ve found myself thinking more about how I fit into this community. I spent around 20 years as a Graphic Designer, and during that time I dabbled in Drupal, theming and site building. It wasn’t until I joined the Web Development Team almost exactly six years ago that Drupal became my day-to-day focus. I think I’m finally starting to feel comfortable calling myself a “Web Developer” — and events like this definitely help with that.
As the title suggests, connection felt like the main theme for me. Yes, connecting with other people in the Drupal world, but also connecting with the topics being discussed. Out of the nine presentations, there were three in particular that lined up closely with work I’m involved with right now.
As part of my work exploring Single Directory Components (SDCs) and how we can integrate them into our platform, I was already familiar with Phil Norton’s (Web Developer at Code Enigma) article on the subject. I had previously followed his guide and had good results, so seeing him present the topic in person was incredibly valuable.
SDCs give us a self-contained, tidy way of organising components and keep us aligned with Drupal’s long-term plans. Since they’re going to be part of Drupal Canvas, this direction makes sense for the future of theming in EdWeb.
While the Web Development Team doesn’t maintain our pattern library EdGel, every now and then we need components that don’t yet exist. Storybook could make those situations much easier by giving us a way to build, preview and test components quickly — and maybe even offer editors a preview before they use components on their sites.
Phil’s talk provided a great recap of the value of SDCs and offered practical insight that will feed directly into our ongoing investigations.
As a primarily frontend developer, this talk caught my attention immediately. I’m currently working on a large piece of work around how images are used across our platform — from performance and quality to accessibility and editorial experience — so the timing was perfect.
Gareth Alexander (from our own team) and Tony Barker (Annertech, LocalGov Drupal and more) raised really important points about how Drupal handles media. For example:
These are questions we’ve been hearing from our own users, so it was encouraging to see others thinking about the same issues. Since Gareth sits just a few desks away, I’m sure I’ll be asking him a lot more about this!
Hilmar Kári Hallbjörnsson delivered this talk with so much energy that it was hard not to be completely pulled in. He spoke about teaching Drupal to university students, so they graduate with the skills junior developers actually need. He teaches a course called Developing Open-Source Web Software, with PHP and Drupal, and with the help of others started the Drupal Open University Initiative to share teaching materials with other teachers.
As someone who works closely with students this really resonated with me. We take on two 12-month placement students every year, plus internships, and I enjoy supporting and mentoring the students. They always bring so much enthusiasm, curiosity and a willingness to dive into challenges. Many have gone on to Drupal roles after working with us, which is great to see.
Hilmar’s message was clear: AI can support development, but it cannot replace the creativity, critical thinking and collaboration that junior developers bring to a team.
I’ll finish off by mentioning Jochen Lillich’s presentation, “GenEI over GenAI – The Human Side of Website Delivery,”. His focus on empathy — on the humans at the heart of everything we build — struck a chord with me.
Coming from a design background, thinking about audiences, tone and voice is natural for me. But at the university, our “audience” isn’t one neat group — it’s editors, site owners, staff, students, parents, guardians… all with different needs. As developers, it’s easy to focus on the technical side and forget the bigger picture, so I appreciated this reminder.
Drupal Camp Scotland 2025 was a great mix of inspiration, reassurance and community spirit. It highlighted the technical challenges we all share, but more importantly, it reminded me how human our work really is.
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