As a recent Baltimore transplant, I was excited to have the opportunity to attend the first Baltimore Drupal Camp last weekend. I work from home on the outskirts of the city and haven’t explored the heart of it too much yet (in daylight hours at least). So it was cool to venture to the camp venue on the University of Baltimore campus, which is integrated into downtown Baltimore.
After an affable keynote by Access Health COO Asher Epstein about tech and investing, I actually sat in on the day long Drupal Beginner Course track. When Last Call was a smaller shop, and more of an “everyone is responsible for everything” enterprise, I used to work hand-on with Drupal more, at least with the interface and sometimes from the backend, fairly regularly. But since I’m a designer and we’re a bigger shop now I get to pretty much stick to defining how to make our sites intuitive and look good, and leave the implementation to people who are much better suited to that task then me. But it was fun to get into the UI again, and find out how much I actually remembered.
Looking around the sessions and the event in general I was surprised at how diverse the attendees were. I’d estimate that the crowd was half women, which is an exciting indication that we may have a more diverse future in store for our industry. Between sessions I got to talk to some people from local shops, including Unleashed Technologies whose awesome banner artwork reminded me of some of the more… ah, interesting branding choices Last Call was entertaining at one time. I had a great time talking to Hosting Sponsors Simple Information at the after party, held at the historic Owl Bar.
Congrats to Baltimore Drupal Camp for a successful event. We’re looking forward to next year!
