DrupalCon SF
About a month ago I packed up my bag and headed off to the great city of San Francisco where the yearly Drupal conference was taking place. This year DrupalCon saw around 3000 people in attendance: Users, Developers, Clients, Companies, Writers, Themers and Designers - a great mix.
This write up is coming a little while since the conference finished, but that's allowed me some time to digest and reflect on what a fantastic event it was.
Firstly, a big hat has to be tipped toward the organizers of DrupalCon. For an event that has doubled in size since last year, it went off without a hitch - registration was seamless, internets available in abundance, sessions recorded and put online before they'd even finished! Kudos to you fine folk.
As expected, the sessions were great. It's a lot to ask someone to stand up in front of 600 people and talk about something for an hour and answer questions, but every session I attended was super-good. Particular take aways for me were the talks on Mobile Application Development with Drupal, Improving Website Performance, Facebook, the Chaos Tools suite and Ubercart. All great talks chock full with nuggets of information that we've either implemented already or will be soon.
I had the pleasure of staying with some Drupal folk from Vancouver (and Missoula) in a great apartment kindly organized by Ariane. Thanks Ariane! You rAwK!
You can't fail to recognize the awesome achievements of the Drupal community as a whole at DrupalCon. From its humble beginnings, Drupal has grown into something truly remarkable. As with all things; the more you put into something, the more you get out and, with this in mind, VentureWeb is actively trying to become more involved in the Drupal Community:
Developer Chris Bovard has got a CVS account application pending for his SimpleTweet module (currently available under GIT), and can be found helping out in the Drupal IRC channels under the username cbovard.
In San Francisco I went along to the sprint the day after the conference - hoping to try and help the documentation efforts for Drupal 7. I sort of ended up/was herded into the code sprint reviewing and testing SimpleTests for core patches. I'm afraid I wasn't quite up to speed and didn't really contribute much back - that makes it 0 for 3 for me in sprints - I'll get a win soon enough. Regardless, I'm hoping to present at an upcoming Drupal Vancouver User Group meeting and also at the upcoming Pacific North-West Drupal Summit that's being held in Vancouver in October - which promises to be awesome.
A goal for the next DrupalCon is to take more of the team to the conference. It's fantastic for developers/themers/buildiers, but there's always Drupal-specific streams for Project Management or Running a Drupal Business - something for everyone, even, even clients who have Drupal websites and want to learn more about the system. If you haven't been to a DrupalCon, I'd strongly recommend it.
That's strange, I'm sure there was an RSS feed around here somewhere...! It must of been stolen, so I've made a new one :) Here it is: http://www.ventureweb.net/feeds/thewall.rss
Thanks for tweeting about the presentation. Should be fun!
Just saw this post, while perusing the site when I was posting a tweet publicizing Olly's talk tomorrow. :-) But I can't find your RSS feed! Sadness. If I am just missing it, let me know, now that I have discovered the blog, would like to keep caught up!
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