Drupal Con London from a newbie's point of view

Published on 16/10/2011 - By George Mastrokolias

Recently I was pleased to attend along with Netstudio's team this year's DrupalCon in London. If someone would ask me what did I take in from the whole experience, I would reply "A whole new view on what 'open source community' means!". It's really astonishing how Drupal's community works and proves that nothing is coincidental:

It's not a coincidence that more and more sites are developed in Drupal.
It's not a coincidence that the greatest educational organizations (.edu) use Drupal.
It's not a coincidence that sites like the White House, MTV, Economist, Examiner and Ubuntu are Drupal sites.
It's not a coincidence that Netstudio now only develops in Drupal!

Let's take things from the beginning though. Not only was it my first DrupalCon (or any -con to be precise), it was my first time in London too and the excitement was intense. Two things that need to be noted, was that although my English is rather fluent (or so I want to believe), I had a really hard time when it came to ordering food. The menu's entries look like gibberish to me so most of the time i resigned to American style food.

Good for me I must say, cause the team's daredevils most of the times never got what they thought they were ordering and were left puzzled!

The second thing that took me by surprise was that i couldn't - for my life - decide which beer to choose!

Needless to say, we replaced all the water intake we needed with... beer. Hey, it's England after all!

On to the serious stuff though; We then visited Fairfield Halls in East Croydon where we met a crowd of 1800 Drupalers.

We met the communities greatest personas; we are of course refering to Dries and Webchick.

We also met our own country's Drupalers, Kostas and Stelios Kourakis (yes, brothers), from PointBlank with whom we discussed many interesting plans and proposals regarding both the spread and growth of Drupal in Greece.

Chit-chat took place in specific pubs where all the DrupalCon-ers were gathered.

Needless to say, the whole thing also featured entertainment acts, including - but not limited to - beautiful ways on how to... build a module!

...and also the famous Batman theatrical show.

We were proud to spread the Drupal spirit throughout London with our t-shirts.

Let's take a look inside the conference.

The atmosphere was amazing. Usually you'd find us in Albert Hall where the most interesting lectures took place...

We always tried to split up though, to make it possible to absorb as much information as possible from as many lectures as possible. During intermissions we assigned tasks to Netstudio's team members according to their field of expertise.

Notable lectures were:

On the last day, we took place in a sprint regarding Internationalization and realized in utter surprise how 200 people can work together, in a single hall, in 8 different projects. We were left speechless with how down-to-earth friendly Drupal's elite were, since Dries was at the next table, participating in the sprint, while Gabor Hojtsy was at our table coordination the i18n sprint.

In retrospect, I think switching to Drupal (oh right, we were developing in Joomla! - forgot to mention that - good riddance!) was Netstudio's smartest move. Not only due to the technology available that makes development faster, efficient and pleasant, but also due to Drupal's amazing community that in it's own unique way urges you to contribute, to give back as much as possible!

Can't wait for our next rendezvous with the Drupal community in Munich!

Newbie over and out!