We’re going to Vienna!

In a bit less than a week's time of writing this post, I’ll be packing my bag and getting ready to fly from Edinburgh to Vienna for the annual DrupalCon event. 

For those reading this who don’t already know, DrupalCon Europe is a community-focused event intended to bring existing community members together as well as encourage new participation in the project. There are a number of session tracks focusing on broadly accessible topics such as “Being Human” all the way through to the detailed and technical sessions. There are also sprint workshops focused on adding features and fixing bugs in the existing and future version of Drupal. In a very real sense, there is something for everyone.

 Compared with some of the other Amazee Labs team members, I am a relative DrupalCon newbie. I’ve only recently moved to the UK, so this will be my second DrupalCon. For some of the team members, this will be their 10th or even 15th DrupalCon!

Something that struck me last year, and that I’m really excited to see again this year, is the diversity of the attendees and how much work the organisers and community put into making the event accessible. I’m really looking forward to seeing people from all ages, races, and genders getting together under the banner of something we all have in common, namely our support (albeit in varied forms) for the Drupal Open Source project.

There is a growing sense of excitement in our daily standups and on our Slack channels as we draw closer to this year’s event. We have people coming from across Europe, South Africa, the UK, Taiwan, and the USA. While most of us are traveling to the event by way of planes, trains, and automobiles we can proudly boast that one of our team members is cycling all the way from Zurich to Vienna through the Alps! This is not the result of a lost bet between rivals but rather Amazee’s latest “Extreme Challenge” participant. Check out the Tour de Drupalps if you are (understandably) intrigued. You can also follow @dasjo or the #drupalps on Twitter.

Amazee submitted a number of session proposals this year and we are extremely proud of our team members who were selected to share their knowledge and ideas with the Drupal community.

Dania and Michael from the Amazee Group will present “How to go from one to seven companies around the world and how to run them”.

Lisa and Sarah will drop some creative styles and share “Motion Design - Improving UX with animations”

Bastian and Tyler from Amazee.io will be showing us “Power to the People - How using containers can make your life easier”. 

John Albin (this being his 14th DrupalCon!) has a talk planned to shed some light on CSS-in-JS and share some of his unexpected lessons for Drupal component design. 

And finally “Everybody cheer! Here comes Media!” will be presented by Sasa and Tadej. 

With so many of our core team members working all over the world, we love to take these opportunities to have some real-world and in-person conversations. Our team dinner is a great opportunity to buy that person - who is usually on the other side of the world - a beer to say thanks for that one time where they made magic happen on that deadline that needed to get done that one Friday. It’s also a great opportunity to seek out that core or module developer and say thanks for all their efforts on the Drupal project.

Looking beyond ourselves, we’re also really excited to see what other companies and teams are doing and thinking. Josef is super excited for the Community Summit on Monday. Mary is excited to see the presentation on “Teaching Clients How to Succeed”, and I’m looking forward to seeing a presentation on Drupal & Ethereum as well as the Commerce 2.0 “Lessons Learned”.

If you’re attending, I hope to see you around! If you’re not attending you’ll be able to follow along with us. During the course of DrupalCon we will be posting at least one blog post per day on our Amazee Labs blog about the various events and highlights of our team’s experiences, so check back here and keep an eye out for our various social media posts.