Drupalcon Boston Rocked!

I was recently fortunate enough to attend the Drupalcon 2008 conference in Boston, MA from March 3rd to 7th. The conference brought together over 800 users, designers, developers and enthusiasts of the Drupal Content Management System for 4 days of networking, training, planning and socializing. It's been a while since my boss was nice enough to send me to a conference, and this one was a great experience. The last conference I attended was in around 1997, and the subject matter was somewhat boring (accounting software for the building products industry). Drupalcon was anything but boring, and well worth the cost of admission.

As with any airplane trip I was a bit nervous about security, short connections, cancelled flights, etc... My flight out of Great Falls was delayed by over an hour due to weather, so I had a feeling I'd miss my 50 minute connection. It turns out that the connecting flight was delayed also, so I had 20 minutes to catch the second plane. A sprint of 40+ gates in the Denver airport got me there just in time to board. I arrived in Boston at around 1:00 and thought I was home free. I bought a one week transit pass for $15, which was good for the subway, bus and light rail. Then I discovered that my luggage did not make the 20 minute connection in Denver. The United rep didn't know where my bag was, but she was pretty sure it hadn't ever left Montana. The next week would be interesting on one change of clothes... I caught what may have been the last cab of the day out of Logan airport at 2:00 am.

The next day was the first day of the conference, so I woke up early and freshened up as much as possible under the circumstances. On about 4 hours of sleep, I found my way to the coffe and bagels downstairs. I wanted to catch the orientation and early sessions and needed to figure out the public transportation situation. Public transportation in Boston ended up being incredibly easy, and my $15.00 'T' pass easily paid for itself.

Day 1 - Monday

The first day I attended these sessions:

  • Walk-in session: Making the most out of your first Drupalcon adventure - An informal welcome from Kieran Lal of Acquia. Kieran was one of the primary organizers of the event, and seemed to be an all-around excellent guy.
  • Drupal Multimedia - Great overview of most of the currently available audio, video, and media modules for Drupal.
  • Dries Buytaert: Welcome to Drupalcon Boston & The State of Drupal.
  • GHOP (Google Highly Open Participation) - The young guns of Drupal. These kids are about 12-16 years old and blew me away.
  • Panels 2 and Nodequeue - Two modules I should have been using for the past 2 years. I've already used them both in the one week that I've been back.
I left a bit early to return to the hotel and check on the baggage situation. There was a networking event with media companies later in the evening that I wanted to catch - but not in 2 day old clothes and needing a shave. I found that my bags were on the way, but would not arrive until 10:00 pm, so I opted to skip the networking event. I'm still bummed about the bag situation, and probably should have gone at least for the food and friends. My bag did finally arrive, and I cleaned up for Day 2.

Day 2 - Tuesday

I'd intended to get to the conference early on day 2, but I ended up sleeping in and enjoying a lazy 2-3 mile walk to the venue. I missed out on the Best practices in development environments, staging, build management, and production environments session, but hopefully the video will be online soon. One very cool thing about Drupalcon is that all sessions were recorded for eventual upload to the video section at archive.org.

Shortly after arriving I met up with Ben Lowenstein. Ben is a great guy from California (originally the Boston area) that I'd been discussing some custom autocomplete code with. He's working on a cool video-based language learning site (I'll post the URL if he says it's ok). We found a place with good internet connection in the lobby and hammered on some code until after lunch.

I did catch these sessions:

  • Performance tuning and optimization of high traffic Drupal sites - I caught the tail end of this.
  • Theming with the Theme Developer module. - Very good new stuff for Drupal 6, but Moshe sure can get sidetracked! Oh well, I can relate.
  • Birds of a Feather Discussion on MySQL performance tuning for Drupal. - Here is where I really started to appreciate some of the brain power that was present at this conference. I knew I was in the right place when I saw drawings of binary trees on people's notepads.
  • Triggers and Actions and Hooks, Oh My! - I stayed for enough of this one to give myself some homework, and moved on to an interesting talk on Flex/Flash and Drupal.
  • Better Drupal Interaction Design with Flex - This was a great demonstration of several ways to integrate a Drupal back-end with a flash/flex front end. I'd done some work with this last year, but there has since been lots of improvement in the technology. The great thing is, it degrades to the non-flash version for SEO, accessibility, etc. Something to keep in mind for jobs that insist on Flash.

Tuesday Night Social Event

Acquia sponsored a social event at a nightclub/pool hall in downtown Boston. It was on my transit route, so I checked it out for a few hours. I had a few good games of pool with very interesting people. I'm a pretty good player, and it brings out the competitive side a bit too much, so I promise I tried not to be irritating. I shared a table for a bit with the Ubercart team. They were incredibly smart, friendly, and pretty good shots! Thanks to Andy and Ryan for a great set of ecommerce modules. After 2 drinks, I headed back to the hotel early to rest up for another day.

Day 3 - Wednesday

I slept in again - just a bit this time. The SimpleTest session would have been great, but I'll catch it on video. I blame the two time zones between Montana and Boston. I wandered around for the last 15 minutes of the morning sessions and chatted with some smart people. I managed to fit some of the Brian Aker MySQL talk into my relatively small brain.

Day 3 sessions:

  • Brian Aker: MySQL - Lots of great information about scaling, technology, and infrastructure of MySQL and Drupal.
  • New JavaScript in Drupal 6: AHAH and Drag and Drop - Nate Haug gave a great demo of the awesome JQuery features in Drupal 6. I planned to catch Nate at some point and talk about autocomplete enhancements for Drupal 7.
  • Selling with Drupal: e-commerce and Ubercart - A good first-person account from Ryan Szrama about development and use of Ubercart. I've been working with the beta releases for a new client, so this was very informative.
  • Druplash and Druplex: Content managed Flash and Flex sites powered by Drupal - This was the second Flash/Flex session, so they're mixed up in my memory. I'm sure it was good though...
  • Birds of a Feather: JQuery founder John Ressig talks with Drupalers - The granddaddy of JQuery Soul. This guy is smart and has some great ideas.

Wednesday night I caught up with Nate Haug of Lullabot to talk about autocomplete enhancements for Drupal 7. I've been working on some ideas for improving the current behavior without breaking existing modules. Nate did a ton of awesome JQuery work in Drupal 6 core, and he encouraged me to move ahead with my ideas in the form of a patch. Thanks again, Nate! I finished up the night with a hot bowl of Vietnamese Pho soup.

Day 4 - Thursday

I spent part of Thursday morning in Chinatown looking for interesting things to bring home. Who knew that there were Vietnamese specialty fabric stores? Boston is pretty cool... The crowd seemed tired but still enthusiastic. The long days of standing, walking and learning were exhausting.

  • Site Recipe: Tracking Event Results with CCK and Views - Interesting stuff that I'm sure will be useful for something down the road.
  • Building a Groups Site - explore the backend of groups.drupal.org - Again, Moshe is a brilliant guy with a seemingly microscopic attention span when public speaking. A great and random talk.

The End

Against my better judgement I had fish and chips for dinner on Thursday. I had an upset stomach for part of the night, and was worried I'd be sick on the plane in the morning. For future reference, never mistake a fish called "scrod" for "cod" - they may be cousins, but that doesn't mean it tastes good. I have a feeling it was caught just below the bridge I crossed on my way to the conference every day. In the end everything worked out fine and I made it home on time.

I'll be attending another Drupalcon as soon as possible, and would recommend it to anyone who can go.