Drupaldelphia Recap

Just a quick recap of Drupaldelphia. I attended and also gave a presentation on Drupal Community Awesomeness.

Another excellent event. I really love the camps as a way to meet new drupallers and learn new things. The smaller scale vs a con for example very much appeals to me. As I mentioned in my presentation, if you want to get in with the drupal community - find a way to get to real live events!

Definitely some excellent presentations at the camp. It was a pleasure to hear a presentation from Jody Hamilton on How to Change Everything and Hack Nothing. Her presentation really captured many of the best practices and biases of the true Drupal expert (in fire-hose fashion!). I also went to her Flat World Knowledge case study just because I really love case studies. There is no better way to get a feel for something than by getting a glimpse of real problems someone had to solve - their pain points, interesting solutions, processes/evolution, etc. Flatworld knowledge is definitely an interesting site/solution.

I attended two other presentations - both of which I enjoyed. Owen's presentation on Security Best Practices for Drupal and the Web was quite good. Less Drupal, more about understanding the security model which is very valuable. I also attended Ivan's presentation on Making Drupal usable and user-friendly: A module showcase. I figured I would probably be aware of most of them (I was), but still I found it useful and interesting - definitely picked up a few good ideas and met some nice people who attended this session.

Regarding my presentation on Drupal Community Awesomeness, I was pretty happy with it. Hopefully the attendees enjoyed it as well. Couple of things I would have like to have done differently. I think there are a couple of slides and veins of thought I'd probably tweak for next time. Also, my time management was a little off - didn't have as much time to play with IRC as I would have liked. I think I met the goal of making IRC not seem so scary, but maybe just barely. On the plus side part of the reason I went over is I allowed each audience member to introduce themselves at the beginning and I think that was helpful for getting them engaged in the presentation from the start. So maybe that was a wash. The slideshare and a link to a document on how to install chatzilla and connect to Drupal IRC rooms (with brief IRC cheatsheet) are posted on my session page on drupaldelphia.org. For the Slideshare, I recommend that you view it ON slideshare directly (there is a link to get there) as on slideshare you can click the Notes tab below the slides to actually see my presenters notes for each slide.

A huge thank you to all the sponsors who made the event possible, as well as the other presenters who gave their time and energy to deliver great presentations. The sponsors even covered food and drink at the after party - how awesome is that!

So all in all the 2.5 hours driving each way was well worth the trip!

Check out the shirt!