This past April, Nashville was home to more than country music and great southern food. For one week, Nashville played host to thousands of professionals who specialize in front & backend web development, work for marketing agencies, are business owners or project managers, and numerous others who provide various web related services. Nashville’s Music City Center became home to Drupal’s annual conference where all such individuals gathered to learn and network. The annual conference, known as DrupalCon, is the biggest gathering in the US for Drupal professionals, presented by the Drupal Association. It gives the Drupal community an opportunity to share and collaborate on:
- Drupal best practices
- Coding standards
- What is new and upcoming with Drupal
- Business models to sell and market and foster the adoption of Drupal as a CMS
- Training sessions
- Coding sessions to advance the development of current and future versions of the open source CMS.
Nashville was a great location to pick for this year’s DrupalCon. The city was teeming with great music and delicious food. You can easily walk for blocks and not have a problem finding a local restaurant that served flavorful food or a bar with a band playing live music. The experience was great and was worth traveling across the country for. Even more interesting is how much money is being put into downtown Nashville. It seemed like everywhere you turned there was a construction project taking place to build a new highrise building.
For many developers, the cost of attending an out-of-state conference is of high concern. Each attendee no doubt weighs in on whether dishing out hundreds of dollars for an entry ticket, airfare, and accommodations is worth it, especially since most of the training sessions and programs are recorded and viewable on the internet for free. Why go? Simply put, for the networking and interaction with other individuals doing the same thing you are and facing the obstacles that you are facing. No matter how far technology advances, there is no substitute for face-to-face interaction. It has and always will be the human way to interact with another.
Drupal has hosted a conference in major cities for over a decade now. I have attended a small share of those, and some have been more memorable than others. DrupalCon Nashville moves to the top of my list, and i don’t think I am alone in this view. Taking into consideration that Drupal 8 is still relatively new and it’s adoption rate is rapidly climbing, there were a lot of individuals who were clamoring for knowledge transfer and sharing. The release of an important Drupal security update weeks before the event heightened the excitement. The attendees who came with how-to questions found their answers at this year’s DrupalCon.
Here are some sessions I attended that made this DrupalCon one of my favorites and that left me feeling reinvigorated to tackle the web: