Los Angeles! One of the world’s most dynamic cities, even frequent visitors love to discover something new in this exciting metropolis. Hollywood, Amusement parks, Disneyland, Universal Studios, Long Beach and DrupalCon 2015 added to the list on the week of May 11 – 15. The attendee list has consistently increased compared to the previous years, Drupal 8 being the prime reason for a lot of new attendees.
Monday:
@ciandt #drupalbiz here @drupalcon Los Angeles pic.twitter.com/hhsT98fzqq
— Felipe Brito (@fgpbrito) May 11, 2015
Extended sprints are a real thing and DrupalCon Los Angeles started with extended sprints for the weekend before May 11. The Day One of our DrupalCon started with summits and we attended our first Business summit this year. Higher Education and Community summits also happened at the same time throughout the day.
Owners and Business Executives of the Drupal agencies were the key folks to attend the Business summit. An oath was taken and people were formed into groups to discuss the assigned topics. Recruiting, Sales & Marketing, Culture, Remote Work, Growth & Scaling Strategies and Products were the topics chosen. We had to choose our own group/topic to learn new ideas and share our own experiences. While our main focus was on the sales topic, we had the pleasure to gather some good information from the rest of the discussion as well.
Acquia organized a partner program meeting in the afternoon. We attended a couple of social events, “First time social attendee” and “Opening reception” sponsored by Achieve Internet and KWALL. We had a great networking session with the fellow community members and of course, we enjoyed the beer!
Tuesday:
The day two started with DrupalCon Pre-note and a Keynote session from Dries Buytaert. He shared some interesting information on the early stages of Drupal. There was an inspiring story of Drupal on how their servers crashed in 2005 and when Dries requested for donations, he was offered with a new server along with a funding of $10,000.
With just a couple of years of exposure in Drupal, I really enjoyed the keynote and learnt a lot of interesting information about the inception of Drupal. We had lots of sessions throughout the day and some of which I attended were “Drupal.org changes to support first time Contributors and Mentors“, “Selling Agile” and “How to run a Drupal Agency“. Drupal Association has provided the videos to all the sessions and you can view it here if you missed anything.
Acquia organized industry meetups on “Public Sector” and “Higher Ed, Non-Profit, Life Sciences and Financial Services”. There were some social events in the evening, “Women in Drupal” and after party organized by Mediacurrent and Lingotek.
Wednesday:
Wednesday was fun to start with a keynote by Whitney Hess followed by ‘Sales Training’ to the partners organized by Acquia. It was a great session, the interesting thing was other Drupal agencies shared their experiences and were happy to help/grow the Drupal community. One of the biggest reasons why the developers always love Open Source – The Power of Community!!!
Acquia’s industry meetup on Media, Entertainment, Publishing and High Tech was organized on the same day evening and Lullabot’s 7th annual DrupalCon after party was fun.
ThursdayWe began with Matt Asay‘s keynote on our fourth day of DrupalCon and had some great sessions on “Angular.js with Drupal 8”, “Open WhiteHouse.gov” and finally had a Q&A with Dries.In the closing session, Drupal Association announced its DrupalCon North America 2016 at
New Orleans. The most exciting news was when Drupal Association announced Mumbai as the venue for DrupalCon Asia in 2016. This would be a great encouragement for the communities around Asia to experience DrupalCon in their region.
Palantir.net organized a Trivia Night and there was an extended sprint on Friday. It was good to see the new sprinters and the presence of 400+ sprinters was really overwhelming. There were separate venues for the First Time Sprinters, Mentored Core Sprint and the General Sprints.
NEW SPRINTERS! Sprinting for #drupal here at @DrupalConNA – thank you for trying something new & helping pic.twitter.com/gtr09feXyR
— Lauren Shey (@lsheydrupal) May 15, 2015
The coffee/lunch and beer throughout the conference was very good. I really enjoyed the mix of American and Asian foods. Barbecues served on Thursday were really cool. Lemberg Solutions volunteered themselves to create a free mobile app for DrupalCon attendees. The app was wonderful and I was able to plan my schedules on the go.
Next?
Congratulations to Drupal Association and the sponsored organizers for altogether a great show. We really had a great time at L.A and are looking forward to see you folks again in DrupalCon New Orleans and Mumbai!!!
