This week we continue with the recent theme of teaching you how a module can extend, alter, and enhance Drupal without modifying core code by looking at hooks.

Drupal 8.3 is still a few months away, coming April 5, 2017, but there are already some changes we can look at, most notably in the experimental modules. In December, 2 new experimental modules were added to core, and BigPipe was officially changed from a beta module to stable. The 2 new modules you’ll find in 8.3 are Workflows and Layout. Let’s take a peek at what these are all about.

The 2017 DrupalCon North America will take place in Baltimore, Maryland from April 24-28. The call for session proposals is quickly coming to a close with a deadline of February 1, 2017. Get some tips for submitting a session proposal and an insider's look at what it's like to be a session track chair from Drupalize.Me trainers Joe Shindelar and Amber Matz.

We always love the opportunity to participate at in-person Drupal events, hang out with old friends, make new ones, and just in general share our enthusiasm for Drupal with others. That's why we're headed to MidCamp 2017 in Chicago March 30th - April 2nd, where we'll be offering our Drupal 8 Theming workshop, attending the camp, and participating in the sprints.

Drupal events are happening all over the world, with people doing amazing things. Since events are so important to the success of our community, we like to support and highlight those making the magic happen. The Italian Drupal community is going to have a great mix of different Drupal activities at their DrupalDay Roma on March 3rd and 4th. We’re happy to be a sponsor for the event and to be giving away some free Drupalize.Me memberships as well.

The DrupalCon Baltimore training schedule was announced earlier today and we're stoked to not only be attending DrupalCon, but to also be providing our Drupal 8 Theming workshop, and having Amber, Blake, and Joe presenting sessions. It's going to be a great con!

We've added several new tutorials to our free Hands-on Exercises: Movie Project, which dive into module development. The first 16 exercises covered site building and theming. These latest additions continue to develop the same movie review site. They require you to start building your own custom modules to add a custom form for adding movie information to the site and use an external API to find and grab the information you need.

We've got some new tutorials on Drupal 8 module development on the different kinds of menu links. We've also added a pair of tutorials on how to add an info file so that Drupal can recognize your module and how to define permissions for a module in Drupal 8. Our Drupal 8 Module Development Guide is ever-expanding; if you haven't checked it out lately, you might want to take a look. So far we've covered topics such as Plugins, Events, and Hooks as well as an assortment of other subjects.

We’ve been busy creating tutorials for you! Mostly we've been focusing on Drupal 8 module development, but we've also made updates to our Configuration Management and Drupal 8 Theming series. In addition, we have a fresh batch of Drupal 7 Hands-On Exercises using the Movie Project. Check out what we’ve published or updated in January and February of 2017.

Drupal Dev Days has been a recurring event since 2010, when it got started in Munich. Since then it has changed location within Europe every year. This year it is being hosted in Seville, Spain from March 21-25. Dev Days is a special event, and I have my own very fond memories from previous years.

This week, we've added 8 new tutorials to our Drupal 8 Theming Guide on breakpoints, responsive image styles, and core themes Bartik and Stark. In these lessons you will learn about breakpoints and media queries, and how Drupal uses these concepts outside of CSS files. We'll cover breakpoint configuration files and how to create one for your theme or module. Then, we'll dive into the Responsive Image module. We'll explore responsive image style configuration, popular responsive image use cases that you can solve with responsive image styles, and, step-by-step, how to create a responsive image style for a viewport-sizing use case. Finally, we have a pair of tutorials on Bartik and Stark. We'll take a look at these core themes, their purpose, and what you can learn from them.

March was a busy month for us as we continue to work on producing the best Drupal 8 tutorials. We released new tutorials for developers of modules and themes alike.

Last week Joe and Blake attended MidCamp 2017 in Chicago. We taught Drupal 8 theming, ate donuts, attended a bunch of sessions, and sprinted on documentation.

This week we're adding 10 more tutorials to our Drupal 8 Module Development Guide which dive into the Render API, an essential part of every module developer's toolkit.

DrupalCon Baltimore officially started yesterday, on April 24th with summits and workshops, and the arrival of thousands of Drupalers from around the world. The Drupalize.Me team delivered a hands-on workshop for Drupal 8 theming to a sold-out room, and kicked off the conference socializing at the official opening reception.

Today, Tuesday, April 25th is the first day of sessions, and it kicks off with the first keynote, by Dries Buytaert, also known as the Driesnote. The Driesnote is also always preceded by the Pre-note, for the early risers. After a full day of sessions and birds of a feathers, the Women in Drupal meetup will be happening at Luckie's Tavern from 6 to 8 p.m. tonight.

On Wednesday, April 26th there are a number of great sessions by Lullabots you don't want to miss:

• Advanced Web Services with JSON API by Mateu Aguiló Bosch at 12 p.m.
• Drupal in the Public Sphere by Matthew Tift at 2:15 p.m.
• Virtual Reality on the Web - An Overview and How to Demo by Wes Ruvalcaba and David Burns at 3:45 p.m.
• Decoupled from the Inside Out by Sally Young at 5 p.m.

This evening don't miss the 9th annual Lullabot DrupalCon party, which this year, is partnered up with Pantheon, and will be held at the Maryland Science Center, starting at 8 p.m. Come meet the Drupalize.Me team and have some fun!

Thursday, April 27th is the last day of sessions and our team will be presenting a session about these Alexa flash briefings and more fun, and a core conversation about learning Drupal, with Mateu from Lullabot leading another core conversation as well.

Drupal, Alexa, and Big Mouth Billy Bass Walk into a Bar by Amber Matz and Blake Hall at 10:45 a.m, API-First Initiative by Mateu Aguiló Bosch at 10:45 a.m. and Why Is Drupal So Hard to Learn? by Joe Shindelar at 1 p.m.

If you're at DrupalCon today and want a chance to win an Echo Dot, go to twitter.com, slash drupalize me, and retweet our tweet about the Drupalize.Me flash briefing. Contest closes at 1pm.

We'll wrap up DrupalCon with the closing ceremony at 3:30 p.m and then have a great night with the classic and always fun Drupal Trivia Night.

Don't forget that there is also a full day of sprints happening on Friday, April 28th, which includes a First Time Sprinter workshop and plenty of mentors to help you get started.

This time of year you can find Drupal events happening all over the world. While everyone knows about the big DrupalCon in Baltimore that just happened last week, there are a ton of great camps taking place as well. We're thankful to the volunteers who support the community by running camps. We've partnered up with several of them as sponsors and to give away free Drupalize.Me memberships. Here is a list of upcoming events that we're proud to be involved with.

Drupal 8 was many years in the making and is gaining in popularity as it matures. One of the aspects of Drupal 8 development that keeps many people from jumping in is that there are still a fair number of contributed projects (modules and themes) that have not been upgraded yet. To recognize the people who do the hard work of creating and maintaining contributed projects, and to encourage more people to upgrade projects to Drupal 8, we will give free Drupalize.Me memberships to Drupal.org project maintainers and the folks listed in Drupal 8's MAINTAINERS.txt file. This will provide a top Drupal 8 training resource for the people on the front lines, making Drupal 8 available to the world.

This month sees the best European front-end conferences for Drupalers going down in Athens, Greece. Frontend United started 7 years ago with a group of Drupal front-enders and themers who wanted to focus on their specialty. Today it has become a very popular place to be for front-end developers, themers, and site builders from many different backgrounds.