Drupalcon DC 2009

Drupalcon Washington DC 2009

Drupalcon in Washington DC was my second Drupalcon experience and first North American Drupalcon. It was about three times larger than the Drupalcon Szeged Hungary that I attended in the summer of 2008. It was awesome to meet the people who I look up to so much and who I have been working remotely with for so many hours and months.

The highlights for me were learning about Drush which I quickly and eagerly adopted into my work flow. Drush is an awesome command line interface shell for Drupal that allows for administration of Drupal sites for tasks such as downloading, installing and enabling modules, clearing cache, running updates, running cron etc. The potential for the shell is limitless and growing quickly. It's one of those things that just can't believe I was ever without it. It is a huge time savor for building and maintaining, like all things CLI.

The jQuery session was also very cool. I am excited to continue my mission to jQuery the world. What an awesome implementation of JavaScript and it is so great that Drupal is fully embracing it.

I watched an interesting theme session that demonstrated the use of good old GNU Emacs, version control, some nice theme techniques and advice for working with a group. Very cool... I still use Emacs consistently on the command line (bash) for Linux system administration. I have used GNU Emacs off and on for many years for development but I must admit that other editors have caught my attention recently when working in the desktop environment. I have come to appreciate simpler keystrokes, code folding and inline syntax checking etc.

I really enjoyed having dinner with Greg and Ezra of GVS and their help with one of my projects.

Meeting up with my long lost friend Leigh for Dinner was very cool. After finishing college in Denver she moved to DC, earned a law degree and became engaged. Go Leigh!

Walking the mall brought back so many childhood memories of vising my mother's side of the family.

Overall, Drupalcon Washington DC was a good experience.