JC 1010E

This past week I attended my first ever Drupal conference in San Francisco. The conference was the official Drupal conference, Drupalcon, that is held bianually. The conferences are typically held once in the US and once in Europe each year. The conference was the biggest conference to date for the Drupal community with over 3000 attendees. The conference itself kept us pretty busy basically all day. We were in sessions from 8:30 to 6:30 with a lunch break in there.

A few of the things that I took away:

- Drupal 7 is going to be awesome. There are tons of new changes and improvements that should greatly improve the speed of a typical Drupal site. I guess that is what we get though with over 2 years of development on the platform. Awesome improvements in the FAPI, Token (now in core), and database layer.

- Drupal is becoming a very impressive platform and highly used. Over 1% of the sites on powered by Drupal now according to Dries Buytaert (Drupal founder). On top of that, there are a lot of high profile sites being powered by Drupal (i.e. whitehouse.gov).

- Drupal developers are some of the most sought after in the market. There are a lot of Drupal jobs out there even in the bad economy. There was a graph in the keynote by Dries Buytaert that showed how many more jobs there are for Drupal developers than for Wordpress or Joomla developers.

- I really enjoyed hearing the keynote from Tim O'Reilly (yes, that O'Reilly) on Tuesday. The internet and the cloud is a place that must be made by the strides of new innovations and developers. Very interesting presentation.

Overall, I quite enjoyed the conference and we are excited to start using D7.

On another note, San Francisco was a lot of fun. I got out a couple of times and ran along the bay. It was really pretty good weather the entire time that we were there and the area was pretty nice. Also, we ate out at several different restaurants, but probably my favorite overall was the Russian Cinderella Cafe (I mean obviously I love Russian food). There is obviously a pretty large Russian population in the area as there are several small such cafes in the area.

A big thanks out to all of those who helped out around here while I was away. I look forward to attending another Drupalcon again in the future.