Our Twitter Train Sponsor Booth at this year’s 2014 NYCCamp at the UN

This year’s 2014 NYCCamp at the UN is a good example of the Drupal Soul Pipeline. We used this camp as an opportunity for presenting on the future of Drupal’s next major release as well as developing and showcasing an exciting internal project. We had relaunched our company website the year before on Drupal 8, well before its official release, and had gained a lot of knowledge on its inner workings (in addition to contributing a lot of work back to the Drupal community). We presented on what we found, but also went further with an internal MakerSpace project just for fun. 

We developed an application on a Raspberry Pi to monitor our company twitter account. We connected the Pi to a model train and programmed it so that whenever someone followed us on twitter it made a train whistle noise and drove the train around the track. This not only tied into our new Drupal 8 website design, which had a train in it, but also was a great collaborative internal team experience that reminded us why we love the work we do.

The end result was a camp in which we were very involved and had a very popular sponsor table to boot. We made a lot of genuinely great contacts, brought a lot of value to the community and were a part of it all in a very natural way. People who find you in this way will call you when they need you. In all our years in this industry, we know this to be true.