DrupalCon Amsterdam: the Deeson digest
Last week was all about DrupalCon Amsterdam.
Deeson’s MD, Tim Deeson, sat on a panel Q&A, I rallied the community with giveaways and things to play with and our Solutions Architect John Ennew joined in hackathons. We also organised Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions.
For those who want to know more, here is our complete guide to Europe’s biggest Drupal conference event which celebrates the community and experiences working with Drupal’s open source software.
1. The keynotes
The two main keynotes at the conference were delivered by Drupal founder, Dries Buytaert, and science fiction author, activist, journalist, blogger and co-editor of Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow. They were very different in style and approach, but both were fascinating and highly informative.
Dries Buytaert
Dries’ keynote focused on the maturity of Drupal as a platform and community. He touched on the inevitable growing pains and the tough choices we all face as Drupal expands its reach and influence.
He drew on proven growth principles, such as the Tragedy of the Commons, to illustrate Drupal’s ‘journey’. He highlighted how Drupal's reach can grow with community support, from local leadership initiatives to rewarding Drupal contributors.
Watch Dries' keynote
Cory Doctorow
Cory discussed the significance of free and open source software, highlighting the challenges and issues which impact us all.
As a tech evangelist, he shared his expert insight into the importance of software transparency in an age where tech and devices infringe on our everyday lives. It was pretty sobering.
2. Drupal 8: the beta release
Dries announced the beta release of Drupal 8. The Drupal community will now be working together to find and fix bugs before the full release of Drupal 8.
3. The sessions
Tim took part in a business-focused panel session entitled: 'Life in the fast lane - achieving sustainable growth'.
The hour-long session went through issues and challenges faced by Drupal agencies, shops and freelancers trying to achieve growth. Read the key takeaways here or check out the video:
4. Mentoring
John signed up as a sprint mentor for the first time and taught new contributors to Drupal Core how they can set up contributing tools.
Mentoring the Drupal community builds confidence and empowers developers to become regular contributors to Drupal Core.
5. Swag demand
The event may focus on code but t-shirts feature heavily.
Our designer, Rachael Case, created a stunning Deeson DrupalCon tee which flew off our stand. They were so popular, people even nabbed the display tees off the wall!
6.Frame of Fame
As you might understand by now, community is at the core of Drupal.
We wanted to celebrate the community who worked on Drupal 8 with our Frame of Fame. Check out the faces behind the code, contributes and commits…
We took the Frame of Fame into the digital world with The Drupal8r...
7. The Drupal8r
Our developer, Chris, created an amazing data visualisation tool, The Drupal8r shows who in the Drupal community developed Drupal 8 during the last 5000 commits. Give it a whirl yourself!
8. The Dries interview
It’s not everyday you get to interview the founder of Drupal, Dries Buytaert. But we did.
We’ll be sharing our conversation with Dries soon, so sign up to our newsletter at the bottom of this page to find out about the successes and failures in Drupal 8 delivery.
We’ll also be publishing our #AskDries video where Dries answers questions from DrupalCon attendees. Watch this space!
9. The BoFs
John and I ran BoFs at DrupalCon Amsterdam. John focused on experiences of integrating Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems with Drupal while I explored the need for personas in the site build process.
You can read the full write up of John’s session here. My session summary is here in a shareable Google Doc which highlights the basic persona questions, plus links to a few resources for persona newbies.
10. Nos vamos a Barcelona para DrupalCon 2015!
DrupalCon Europe 2015 is in Barcelona. So we're going to brush up on our Spanish. ¡Vamos!
