I just joined Last Call Media a couple of weeks ago, and was invited to join my new peers for a trip to Boston for Design 4 Drupal. I was super excited for a couple of reasons. A) I love a road trip, and B) this was my first opportunity to meet my new and extended Drupal family.
So, given that I am not a morning person, I set two alarms. I did not want to be late to the meet-up spot and have my new coworkers leave without me, or think that I am a total slacker. I showed up at 5:57am and was the only car there. I started to feel foolish, like I had been the subject of a hilarious practical joke designed to break in the new team members. I imagined my coworkers plotting against me “Just string a couple letters and numbers together, make an early meeting time on one of her first weekends. You can imagine my relief, as the earliest of my coworkers started to trickle in, oh, and it turns out they are not the bullies I had imagined. I now know that 6am means 6ish (I think this is called Last Call standard time or LCST, for any event that begins before 8am). From here we started our convoy, with 11 Last Callers en route. Monster Energy Drink and Old School Rap tunes first thing in the morning had me amped for my first day long All-Geek event!
We arrived at MIT (what an amazing campus, btw) with plenty of time to set up a booth and attend the Keynote: Steve from Republic of Quality gave a heartfelt talk about being emotionally connected to your work and how to demonstrate this with your content.
We had one of the first sessions of the morning, Case Study: lastcallmedia.com, where we were able show how heartfelt and connected we all are to our work.
It became clear to me that I have joined a very engaging team, as I sat in on my new coworkers presenting their work; I learned that we have the first commercial site in the US running on Drupal 8. It was a great opportunity to treat ourselves to a very special site redesign and tackle Drupal 8, which was still alpha, and get our hands dirty with constant upgrades. The team was so pumped to share their experience with the Drupal community!
There was a great deal of excitement from the attendees who were impressed that we invested the time and resources to work with Drupal 8. It made me very proud of where I work! After the session, attendees flocked to our booth to find out more about our site and to ask more specific questions. There is certainly is a lot of buzz about Drupal 8 and lastcallmedia.com.
I met a lot of great people in the Drupal community, and went to a few sessions myself.
Erin Holloway gave a lot of nice pointers for streamlining communication in the Anti-Handoff session and visuals to increase efficiency in the design/development process, from emails to Photoshop shortcuts. This session was well attended by Last Call; I looked around the room and saw, Sean, Colin and Julia.
Jeff reported that he really enjoyed The Accessible Experience: Designing for Everyone session, where he was introduced to different accessibility tools and was able to see them demonstrated.
Jayme reported that “the presentation RWD on a Budget WTF offered a good reminder about the countless small non-profits who both require and deserve a quality responsive website, but who do not have much of a budget. Large scale, and hence, expensive projects have more and more become the central focus of the industry. In our enthusiasm to see how far we can push the envelope of what we can do with Drupal for clients who have the budget to allow us to take it to this level, smaller companies—and in particular smaller non-profits—often get left behind. Johanna Bates and her collaborative made the important point that Drupal is still an excellent tool for making responsive websites that, while are perhaps not as ambitious to produce, offer a way to contribute to making the world a better place.”
Our very own Rob hosted a well-attended session at the end of the day, although technically way over my head, it must have had some good meat that developer types could chew into because I received several requests for the slides and code samples. You can find his presentation here.
Most of us finished out the night at the General Assembly in Boston for a super time at the WeWork coworking space. What a cool spot. We challenged other developers to table tennis, learned a little mixology as we played “bartender” by hand squeezing our own lemons and crafting our Tom Collins drinks.
