DrupalCon Munich

DrupalCon Munich took place last week—well, last-last week, I guess—and it was pretty rad. I just got home a couple days ago, myself. My wife Erin and I figured that as long as I was in Germany already, we may as well make a trip of it, so she flew out on Friday (the sprint day of the con) and we spent the weekend in Munich, then flew up to Berlin for the following week. The whole trip was a blast, but we're talking about DrupalCon here.

If I'm being honest, the first couple days of the conference were largely lost on me. I was more jet-lagged than I thought, and I think a little bit culture-shocked by failing to understand just about everything that was being said around me. I took a year of German in college (eight years ago now), but that did remarkably little for my ability to communicate with people there.

Once my sleep cycle evened out and I got my legs under me, I had a great time. I wound up spending a lot of time talking with the newly-former Drupal Ladder Steering Committee about what we were doing and how, which was exactly the refresher I needed for that project. The Drupal Ladder has been my primary focus in the contrib world for a couple months, but I hadn't been very enthusiastic about it of late. Doling out responsibilities and making some decisions during DrupalCon made me feel a lot better about where we're going and how we're going to get there, so the week was worth it just for that.

I also really enjoyed the "Get Involved with Core Sprint" on Friday. This was a sprint led primarily by the core mentoring crew (meaning xjm and tim.plunkett this time around), and it went swimmingly. Cathy and I hosted a BOF on Thursday afternoon to help new sprinters get setup with a local Drupal 8 site, and it wound up being remarkably effective: a bunch of first-time sprinters arrived Friday morning all setup and ready to contribute! Fellow Lullabots Addi and Joe led a workshop in the morning to get people more completely setup: local dev site, git, how to use IRC and the issue queue, etc. Between the BOF and the workshop, the entire group was firing on all cylinders by noon.

A ton of issues were worked on, and it seemed like everyone knew what they were doing: I kept wandering the room, looking for people that needed help, but no one did! Instead, I spent most of my time looking for more issues that people could work on because the group was chugging through them so quickly.

Talking about the Ladder and helping out at the sprint were definitely the highlights of my DrupalCon. I only attended a few sessions, including the two I spoke at (Drupal Ladder and Making Meetups Work), and didn't even make it to any core conversations, but it was a very productive week. Now I need to go back and watch the videos for a bunch of sessions I missed!