I was one of the lucky 3100+ attendees that got to attend DrupalCon Los Angeles in May. It offered all of the things that I’ve come to expect from DrupalCons - a great keynote by Dries to start it off, more interesting sessions than you could fit into your schedule, fun filled after hours events like Drupal trivia night which always helps me realize just how many things I still don’t know about Drupal and the community around it, and then sprints to close out the week.
DrupalCons always have a great set of sessions, and this year’s was no exception. We sent a pretty small group to LA for the conference this year, and we’ve put together a short list of the talks that resonated with a couple of us. Though everyone attending from Last Call Media had development backgrounds, we found interesting discussions across almost all of the session tracks throughout the week.
Rob enjoyed a wide variety of presentations ranging from technical talks to ones centered around the business side of things. His favorites included:
- Schnitzel’s Learning from our launched Drupal 8 Core customer projects that touched on many of the same pain points that we’ve experienced maintaining a Drupal 8 site through its development cycle.
- Annabella and Vcreatrix’s talk titled Rethink Drupal Support. Stop the Bleeding! that brought a refreshing amount of enthusiasm to the subject of Drupal support, talking about ways to make it more enjoyable and manageable for the team and less painful for the client.
- The Building Your (Drupal-based) Business: Or… What Keeps You Up At Night? panel featured people from some very different companies built around Drupal - each with their own approaches to successfully running their companies. Rob’s takeaway from this session was “There’s no one perfect way to run a Drupal shop.”
I bounced from one track to the other throughout the week. I found some really great sessions outside of the coding and development track that I’ve typically stuck to at past DrupalCons. Some that I recommend checking out if you weren’t able to attend yourself are:
- Eaton’s The Battle for the Body Field talk which discussed ways that he recommends allowing users access to enter rich content into the body field without making things too crazy for editors or developers.
- Schnitzel’s case study titled SecondScreen for a national TV show with realtime pushes and crazy traffic, that talked about all of the things that the title describes, but also how the Amazee team worked closely with shows like “Switzerland’s got Talent” to provide a website with an interface that allowed its editorial staff to keep up with the fast pace of live TV.
- SiliconValet and Mrjmd’s Weather.com: A Novel Presentation Framework, which discussed how they created a tool that let the Weather Channel’s talented front end team build angular modules that can get placed into panels on their massive Drupal site without really having to know anything about Drupal itself.
DrupalCon was a big win for Last Call Media. On top of all of the great sessions, we also enjoyed seeing old friends and meeting new people from around the world that share the same passion for Drupal as we do here. We had a great time in LA, and are looking forward to seeing everyone again next year in New Orleans!
