Drupalcon DC was Awesome!
Some of the highlights of Drupalcon DC for me were:
- Meeting Karen Stevenson (KarenS), maintainer of the Date, Calendar and CCK modules - I had worked with her on the localizable date formats patch, as part of the Sony project, and it was great to finally meet her in person. Karen - you rule!
- Meeting Jim Berry (solotandem), maintainer of the Deadwood module. We're working on merging Coder and Deadwood modules together for Drupal 7 at the moment, so it was great to be able sit down face to face and have a brain-storming session. New merged module coming soon, so watch this space!
- Meeting other CivicActions folks, including Nathaniel Catchpole (catch), Owen Barton (grugnog2), Trevor Twining and Bevan Rudge (bevan), to name just a few.
- The session by Barry Jaspan & David Strauss on the new Field API in Drupal 7, aka "CCK in core". It looks really great and will be a major benefit to Drupal going forwards.
- I also found the panel session on Usability Testing at the University of Baltimore quite good. It was entertaining in some ways, but scary in others. One thing's for sure - I will certainly be paying more attention to the usability of all the user interfaces I create from now on!
- The Coder module for Drupal 7 sprint that happened on the last day was great. While we had internet connectivity issues and it took us a while to get organised, we did get a lot done. Special thanks to Steve Mokris (smokris) for cloning and re-organizing the Converting 6.x modules to 7.x handbook page into categories and many useful 6.x to 7.x coder rules; and also thanks to Robin Barre (robeano) for her help with the coder rules, testing and for not allowing me to go completely hyper on too much sugar!
There are quite a few sessions I wished I had got to, but unfortunately didn't, including Moshe's and Mike's session on migration (sounds amazing!) and Development Seed's Context and Spaces. Needless to say I'll be busy watching the videos of these sessions online over the coming weeks.
I didn't get to do much sightseeing in Washington DC while at the conference, unless you count the brief glimpse of the Washington monument out a taxi window as we sped by. However, I've visited DC before, so hanging out with Drupal folks was more of a priority for me to be honest. The weather was a little strange though - when I landed it was freezing, with temperatures as low as -10°C, definitely warm layers, coat, hat and gloves territory. However by the time I headed back home, it was a balmy 20°C!
I had mixed flying experiences. On the way over to DC, I flew direct with Aer Lingus to Dulles. The plane was mostly empty, which meant I had an entire row to myself! I also had my own personal t.v. (always nice), but for the first time in my travel history, it was a touch screen and I could play, pause and rewind whichever movie I chose to watch! Then when my laptop battery ran out of power, the staff were nice enough to allow me to move to the emergency exit so I could plug it in! Way to go Aer Lingus!
The return journey wasn't as straightforward though. For a start, I wasn't flying direct. Instead I had to fly to JFK with JetBlue, before catching an Aer Lingus flight back to Dublin. That's where the trouble started. My flight out of DC was delayed, and it was 2 hours late by the time we actually boarded the plane. Then they couldn't start the engines, so they tried to kickstart one (yes, you read that right). While this worked, they managed to damage a panel on the underside of the plane. Between the engine issue and replacing the panel, we were sitting on the plane waiting for another 2 hours. By this stage I had missed my flight to Dublin from JFK, but at least The Daily Show was keeping me entertained. Finally, when we got to the runway, we had missed our slot and couldn't take off for another hour!
On arrival at JFK, I had to change terminals and hope I could get on the later flight home. I ran all the way to departures, only to be told I needed to go to the arrivals hall. Once I got to arrivals, then sent me back up to departures. Needless to say I was not a happy camper at this point. However, once back in departures I managed to get a ticket for the later flight - whose gate was closing in 10 mins! So legged it through duty free (sigh) and a nice woman at security screening area allowed me to jump the queue. I just made it to my gate as it was closing. Yay! My plan was to treat myself to a glass of wine for managing to make it - however I was out for the count by the time we took off. :)
Return flight saga aside, I had an absolutely awesome at Drupalcon DC and am sad that it's all over. All I can say is roll on Drupalcon Paris!
