Hello everybody. So Tuesday has been the first day of DrupalCon Chicago and lots of great things happening around the Drupal community. First, Dries Buytaert, project lead of Drupal, gave his keynote and talked basically about the future of Drupal, an overview of Drupal 8 and of course the philosophy behind it. I think that he is in the right path on his assumptions of media consumption and how people are using mobile devices increasingly. I think that one important aspect that Drupal has to implement is a straight upgrade process. WordPress has the capacity of allowing people to update with one click. Again, I am not saying that Drupal has to become WordPress, what I am saying is that this particular feature would play to the benefit of Drupal in terms of speed of adoption.
On Wednesday I attended several great sessions including the session on drush make. I was very positively impressed by the way that Dimitri, the expositor, has grown into becoming one of my favorite presenters of the conference so far. I watched one of his presentations, when he is 12 years old, and he talks at Google about Jquery. Even though the material we was presenting was in itself great, I think he lacked the necessary communication skills to drive a successful exposition. Now, three years later, listening to Mr. Dimitri live, I can see how he has grown and how obviously he is much more capable to use his set of skills to not only train but entertain the audience.
The topic of his talk was Drush make. In my opinion one of those modules for Drupal that eventually you won’t be able to live without, in other words an addictive module.
As for my first experience at DrupalCon, I have to say that it has been up and down. Almost like with any conference you have a difficult time choosing the best session for you. Specially if you really don’t know the presenters and their backgrounds.
One thing is certain: Drupal is getting bigger. To me it was only a matter of time – just as with any great idea.
I don’t think I would be attending DrupalCon London, however I’ll certainly hope I get the chance to visit more DrupalCons in the near future.
