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?

Diamonds and magic at DrupalCon Dublin

The dust has settled, we’ve recovered from Drupal Flu and had some time to reflect on our experience as DrupalCon Dublin diamond sponsors. It was awesome, no doubt about that! 

Ever since Druid was founded four years ago, our principle has been to actively support and give back to the Drupal community. In addition to sponsoring events, we’re also among the top 30 code contributors globally. 

DrupalCon diamond sponsorship had been on our bucket list since the very beginning, and we wouldn’t have been able to do this without the amazing Drupal community. So our biggest thanks go to everyone who has supported, encouraged, and challenged us along the way. It feels incredible that we’ve come this far in only four years. Believing in our own way of doing things, which may not be the most conventional way, has paid off. Our long-term plan is to expand our foothold outside of Finland, so raising people’s awareness of the company at DrupalCon certainly didn’t hurt.

We also want to thank the Drupal Association, Drupal Ireland and the Convention Centre Dublin for a very well organized event. The venue was great, with stunning views over the river Liffey, and the friendly staff made the event all the more delightful.

Our booth at the exhibit hall drew the crowd quite nicely. Whether it was because of the old school arcade games, our much-complimented swag featuring our recently renewed logo, or pure interest towards our doings, we were happy to see the bustle and make new acquaintances. Thanks to all booth visitors for the great chats and laughs!

Content-wise, Druid was represented by Lauri Eskola and Bart Feenstra who both gave two talks at the event. Special thanks go to our kindred spirit Jonna Tiainen who, as the Product Owner of the project, totally rocked our Restel.fi showcase presentation together with Bart. In the showcase, they described how a complex Drupal 8 site was built from an agile project management aspect – from a human aspect, really. Here’s the recording: 

And here you can check our other presentations:
    •    Drupal 8 theming in depth by Lauri
    •    A cautionary tale for defensive programmers by Bart
    •    Core conversation: Create a new user-facing theme by Lauri

A few of us stayed in Dublin for the sprints which were also very well organized, this time by Rachel Lawson. Bart contributed as a sprint mentor and Druid was one of the sponsors for the sprint mentors’ thank-you dinner.

Needless to say, this fun-loving bunch of Druids felt at home in Dublin in the late hours as well. We hosted some (improvised) (after) parties at our penthouse, and were one of the sponsors of the Women in Drupal get together. We also very much appreciated that we could fit into the amazing Trivia Night venue this year!

Without underrating the learning and networking aspects, one of the best parts about DrupalCon is that we get to hang out with each other as a team. As most of us are working at customers’ premises a few days per week and three of us are permanently abroad, spending time with each other at DrupalCon is pure gold. It wasn’t just about bonding over a pint of Guinness – well, mostly, but not only: we also took the time for a full-day internal training before the event officially kicked off.

A great, memorable week with lots of new friends made, old friends caught up with and Druid’s magic sprinkled around Dublin. See you in Vienna next year, and hopefully many times before that!