DrupalCon 2016: Key Takeaways by Monsoon Consulting
Back at Monsoon Consulting HQ, we’ve been reflecting on our experiences at DrupalCon 2016. This hotly-anticipated event is one of the highlights of the Drupal community calendar, and this time, it was held in our home city of Dublin. As Silver Sponsors, we were there to attend sessions and sprints, meet with members of the global, open source community, and catch up with latest developments in Drupal technology. Here, we share some of our highlights from DrupalCon Dublin 2016.
As experts in Enterprise Content Management solutions, we provide a range of Drupal Development Services to our clients. So, when we heard that the next DrupalCon event was to be held on our doorstep, we were delighted to get the opportunity to welcome the global Drupal community, and showcase some of the projects that we have completed. Despite the fact that our proposed DrupalCon talks were rejected (of course this made us sad!), we sent a team of Drupalers to Dublin’s Convention Centre for a week of exciting talks and exhibits. In this post, Monsoon’s Daniel Alb, Bharat Sharma, Harsh Sharma and Archie Vasyatkin share what they learned from the conference:
Daniel Alb - Head of Design
Our very own @danielalbro putting the finish touches to the @monsoonconsult booth. Come say hello! #DrupalCon pic.twitter.com/hoIVBnMaAz
— Monsoon Consulting (@monsoonconsult) September 26, 2016
Daniel's Diary
- Drupal as a platform looks towards the future and there’s a big community of enthusiastic developers to take it there.
- Backed up by Acquia, Drupal is a strong contender in the enterprise level CMS market. This view is supported by Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management.
- Drupal 8 has re-engineered the Drupal core to make it a modern, future-oriented CMS.
- There is a large community of partners offering tools & extensions that integrate with Drupal to improve functionality, and ultimately add value to client projects.
- At Monsoon Consulting, we follow an agile software development methodology. This approach can be adapted and implemented to successfully run Drupal development projects.
- Drupal Commerce is not dead! In fact, for websites which require a flexible e-commerce feature that’s simple to manage, Drupal Commerce is a great solution. To learn more, check out the work we did with Asthma Society of Ireland.
- Overall, DrupalCon Dublin was a well organised, successful event, combining intense Community Development Sprints with Irish banter and fun. Social events such as the Trivia night were hugely successful.
- Drupal devs are nice, well behaved and passionate people who love to chat and share their experience and knowledge!
- Our DrupalConrejectedtalks pet project was well received by the community.
- And last, but not least, our t-shirts & stickers were also a hit. Wear the kite!
Here's some cool @monsoonconsult swag we have for you #drupal people. Come meet us @DrupalConEur #DrupalCon pic.twitter.com/Ud9Nz4AXDb
— Daniel Alb (@danielalbro) September 26, 2016
Bharat Sharma - CEO
. @monsoonBharat just stopped by to tell us about #DrupalCon Rejected Talks - submit yours here 😉 https://t.co/U5yRaoHrnp pic.twitter.com/4nsDHv0Cyc
— Drupal Ireland (@drupalireland) September 27, 2016
Bharat's Best Bits
- DrupalCon is the most vibrant and community-focused open source event that one can attend
- This was a diverse event, with attendees from Drupal agencies and solution providers from all over the world
- DrupalCon is very useful to learn about new platforms, processes, and affiliated services
- This week was a great opportunity for Monsoon to engage in networking
- Some of the Business sessions were excellent – I realised that there are €15-25 million turnover agencies based in Europe, working purely with Drupal
- My favourite talk from the conference was from Maxime Topolov, who discussed how to scale a Drupal Shop from €1m to €12m in revenue
- Event-based marketing and channel partnering are strong routes to market
- After attending DrupalCon, I felt a burst of positivity and a sense of direction! I can’t wait to get stuck in 🙂
Harsh Sharma – Tech Development Lead, Drupal
And Monsoon Consulting's own Harsh Sharma listed among the talented #Drupal devs of @drupalireland #DrupalCon pic.twitter.com/bzibyuNaFg
— Monsoon Consulting (@monsoonconsult) September 29, 2016
Harsh's Highlights
- I attended the full week of events at DrupalCon, from Sunday to Saturday
- To help settle newcomers into DrupalCon, there was a social event for first time attendees on Monday
- On Tuesday, there were lots of really good pre-notes, keynotes and informative sessions. In the evening, I got to meet with lots more people from the Drupal community at the boat party, which was a lot of fun!
- Highlights from Wednesday included a great session on Drupal Commerce, focusing on how to launch online stores with Commerce 2.x on Drupal 8
- Thursday included many more interesting sessions and sprints, before the closing ceremony. We learned that more than 1700 people attended this year’s event, 160GB of internet was used, and the next DrupalCon will be held in Vienna, Austria!
- Thursday’s Trivia Night was held at the Mansion House, where I took part on the judging panel. This was a great opportunity for Drupalers to test their knowledge, and to have lots of fun in the process. Around 70 teams with 4-5 members competed to take the title of Drupal trivia champions
- Some of my favourite learning points from DrupalCon included topics such as Drupal Commerce, Scalable Caching, Drupal 8, and How to Build a Healthy Drupal Team, and lots of sprints!
Archie Vasyatkin - Senior Drupal Developer
We're all set. Booth 604. @monsoonconsult #DrupalCon #drupal Come by to get some cool swag & register your #drupalconrejectedtalks pic.twitter.com/g0jL76mYcA
— Daniel Alb (@danielalbro) September 26, 2016
Archie's Anecdote
What was good…
- There was some very useful technical talks: PHP Better Coding Standards, Working with Cache, Content Migration, Commerce 2.0
- There were a lot of dev / service companies at the event, where we could share experiences and get a lot of good input on overall processes and workflow
- DrupalCon was a good opportunity for us to understand where we currently are, and where we should go
- Drupal 8. It has a future. A great and bright future.
- Some potential contacts with employees and companies
- We got to showcase ourselves
- FREE STUFF AND FOOD!
What was not so good…
- Unfortunately, a lot of very cool talks were overlapping each other at the same time
- 1 hour per talk is not enough to get all the information
- DrupalCon highlighted some areas for us where our team needs to improve in Drupal. But, we will fix it!!!
Check out Archie’s ‘DrupalCon-g’ sketch!
Drupal-ConG. A #DrupalCon inspired comic art by @monsoonconsult own #Drupal dev pic.twitter.com/6HWPye3mVb
— Daniel Alb (@danielalbro) September 29, 2016
To sum it up, DrupalCon Dublin 2016 was an excellent learning experience for Team Monsoon. We met with lots of people from the global community and attended some really good talks and sessions about the future of Drupal. There are lots of learning points that we can now apply to our projects.
Next stop – Vienna 2017!
Do you need help with your website? If you’d like to find out more about our Drupal Development Services, get in touch with our team – we’d love to help! Call us on +353 (0)1 4750066, email us at [email protected] or visit us at our offices in Dublin and London.
