As I type this, Jeff Landfried, Kelly McCabe, and myself are sitting poolside at the Hotel Figueroa in downtown LA, banging out some last-minute work before the start of Drupalcon. We’re trying to clear our schedules to make room for all of the awesomeness that’s about to happen at the convention center a block away. Here are the things we’re most excited about over the coming week:
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Content Strategy: Two years ago, I saw Lullabot’s Jeff Eaton speak in Portland (“Building for a Post-mobile world”), and it was a game-changer in terms of how I think about Content Management Systems. He is speaking again tomorrow morning, and needless to say, I’m excited about it. Even though content strategy isn’t really my area of expertise (I leave that to the experts, like Kelly Albrecht), it’s incredibly useful to understand WHY we structure content the way we do.
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Dev-Ops: Kelly McCabe has lined up a great schedule of great dev-ops related sessions she’s interested in. In particular, “Defense in Depth: Lessons learned securing 100,000 Drupal Sites”, “How Jenkins can work for the Whole Team”, and “PHP Containers at Scale: 5K Containers per Server.” We’re always looking for ways to optimize and improve our operations, and this week is going to be nothing short of inspirational.
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Getting off the “island”: Jeff Landfried is clearly sick of Drupal, because his schedule is chock full of sessions from the Symfony track. While I’m kidding about Jeff being sick of Drupal, he is excited to see opportunities to interact with the larger PHP community, and is really looking forward to Fabien Potencier’s sessions. He wants to find new ways to bring advanced, app-like functionality to Drupal sites using the Symfony components.
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Management: Managing a Drupal shop is really complicated. There are a lot of people in the industry, but only a handful who are doing Drupal really well when it comes to product quality, team efficiency, employee satisfaction, and company growth. Dealing with these often-competing interests is tough, and I’m looking forward to sessions like “Creating a Culture of Empowerment”, and “Building a Sustainable Recruiting Strategy for Drupal and Beyond.” I’m hoping to bring home some good strategies for how we can continue to grow Last Call Media while keeping our employees and clients happy and fabulously wealthy.
Last but certainly not least, my favorite part of any Drupalcon has to be getting to meet the amazing people that inspire me. It’s always inspiring to bump into people you’ve admired from afar (like Ryan Szrama, primary author of the Drupal Commerce suite, or Cathy Theys, sprint organizer extraordinaire) and realize just how friendly and open this community really is. That’s it for now! Catch you after the conference!
