DrupalCon LA Round-Up: Wrapping Up and Looking Ahead

A number of us from Forum One are sticking around for Friday’s sprints, but that’s a wrap on the third day of DrupalCon and the conference proper!

Wednesday and Thursday were chock-full of great sessions, BoFs, and all the small spontaneous meetings and conversations that make DrupalCons so fruitful, exhausting and energizing.

Wednesday

Forum One gave three sessions on Wednesday. John Brandenburg presented Maximizing Site Speed with Mercy Corps, a case study of our work on www.mercycorps.org focusing on performance optimization. Kalpana Goel of Forum One and Frédéric G. Marand presented Pain points of learning and contributing in the Drupal community, a session on how to encourage and better facilitate code contributions to Drupal from community members. And finally Forum One’s Andrew Morton presented Content After Launch: Preparing a Monkey for Space, a survey of content considerations for project success before, during, and after the website build process. The other highlight from my perspective on Wednesday was a great talk by Wim Leers and Fabian Franz on improvements to Drupal performance/speed, and how to make your Drupal sites fly.

Thursday

On Thursday, Daniel Ferro and Dan Mouyard rounded out the seven Forum One sessions with their excellent presentation, To the Pattern Lab! Collaboration Using Modular Design Principles. The session describes our usage of Pattern Lab at Forum One to improve project workflow and collaboration — between visual designers, front- and back-end developers, and clients — an approach that has eased a lot of friction on our project teams. I’m particularly excited about how it’s allowed our front-end developers to get hacking much earlier in the project lifecycle. (We were glad to see the presentation get a shout out from Brad Frost, one of the Pattern Lab creators.)

Other highlights for me on Thursday were the beloved Q&A with Dries and friends and sitting down over lunch with other Pacific Northwest Drupalers to make some important decisions about the PNW Drupal Summit coming to Seattle this fall.

Next Stops for DrupalCon

In addition to looking ahead to DrupalCon Barcelona, the closing session revealed the exciting news that DrupalCon will be landing in Mumbai next year!

#DrupalCon is coming to Mumbai! Plus other photos from todays closing session https://t.co/Y3vWCQCSTu? pic.twitter.com/zEt4Y6VLxS

— DrupalCon LosAngeles (@DrupalConNA) May 15, 2015

And the always anticipated announcement of the next DrupalCon North America location… New Orleans!

And the next North American #DrupalCon will be…… pic.twitter.com/AXiFxv3gfW

— DrupalCon LosAngeles (@DrupalConNA) May 14, 2015

That news was ushered in soulfully by these gentlemen, Big Easy style, pouring out from the keynote hall into the convention center lobby.

Great way to announce #DrupalCon New Orleans! #DrupalConLA pic.twitter.com/3cRmV8jI1F

— Andy Hieb (@AndyHieb) May 14, 2015

And to finish off the day properly, many of us hooted and hollered at Drupal trivia night, MC’d by none other than Jeff Eaton.

Another fantastic #DrupalCon trivia night in progress… Woo! pic.twitter.com/AzavA2AFXi

— Jeff Eaton (@eaton) May 15, 2015

A great con was had by all of us here at Forum One… On to the sprints!