Druid’s DrupalCon Dublin session digest
Yes, yes, we already wrapped up the event for our part earlier this week. But we just couldn’t quite stop yet. What’s great with DrupalCon is that it really offers something for everyone, so we decided to list some of the sessions we found interesting and useful at the event. Oh the variety! If you were not in Dublin – well, even if you were – you can hopefully find something worth a listen out of these picks.
Let’s start with Angie Byron’s super interesting talk that presented an analysis of Drupal’s competitors, where they are currently outshining Drupal and how we can change that. Definitely worth checking out!
Being Human
The new ‘Being Human’ session track clearly resonated with the community. The track offered some excellent presentations, including:
- Justine Pocock’s How to deal with a life of crazy and keep your cool, mostly
- Jess Rose’s Impostor syndrome and individual competence
- Anthony Lindsay’s Happiness is…remote working.
Project Management
We also recommend checking the panel session about project methodologies (Scrum, Kanban and Waterfall) by Jeffrey McGuire, Shannon Vettes, Ashleigh Thevenet, Jenn Sramek, and a few others. Although the topic itself was already familiar to us, the session was really fun and inventively presented as a dating game.
As a sidenote: It took us slightly by surprise that not so many companies at DrupalCon seem to work with agile methods. Perhaps we should start expanding our agile trainings abroad… 😉
Technical
On the technical side, there were loads of good stuff. A few recommendations here:
- Fabian Franz’s presentation on a streaming based architecture and the possibilities it brings to performance optimization was very useful.
- Dave Hall’s Let the machines do the work was a funny introduction to automation.
- Lewis Nyman offered some useful tips for a collaborative design process and running effective workshops.
- David Porter showed in his presentation how Varnish can be used beyond caching.
Business
And finally, on the business side, these two sessions hit the right note:
- Maxime Topolov’s presentation on scaling a Drupal agency from 1€M to 12€M of revenue
- Michel van Velde’s presentation on why, when and how you should consider diversifying your business
Now there’s some food for thought for us, and presumably for many others as well.
What were your favorite sessions? Any must-hears that we missed?
