Recently I was pleased to attend along with Netstudio's team this year's DrupalCon in London. If someone would ask me what did I take in from the whole experience, I would reply "A whole new view on what 'open source community' means!". It's really astonishing how Drupal's community works and proves that nothing is coincidental
Let's take things from the beginning though. Not only was it my first DrupalCon (or any -con to be precise), it was my first time in London too and the excitement was intense. Two things that need to be noted, was that although my English is rather fluent (or so I want to believe), I had a really hard time when it came to ordering food. The menu's entries look like gibberish to me so most of the time i resigned to American style food. 
Good for me I must say, cause the team's daredevils most of the times never got what they thought they were ordering and were left puzzled! 
The second thing that took me by surprise was that i couldn't - for my life - decide which beer to choose!
Needless to say, we replaced all the water intake we needed with... beer. Hey, it's England after all!
On to the serious stuff though; We then visited Fairfield Halls in East Croydon where we met a crowd of 1800 Drupalers. 
We met the communities greatest personas; we are of course refering to Dries and Webchick. 
We also met our own country's Drupalers, Kostas and Stelios Kourakis (yes, brothers), from PointBlank with whom we discussed many interesting plans and proposals regarding both the spread and growth of Drupal in Greece.
Chit-chat took place in specific pubs where all the DrupalCon-ers were gathered. 
Needless to say, the whole thing also featured entertainment acts, including - but not limited to - beautiful ways on how to... build a module! ...and also the famous Batman theatrical show. 
We were proud to spread the Drupal spirit throughout London with our t-shirts. 
The atmosphere was amazing. We usually went at Albert Hall where the most interesting presentations were held... We tried to attend as many lectures as we could to get the vast majority of info. The most interesting lectures were:
- It's not a coincidence that more and more sites are developed in Drupal.
- It's not a coincidence that the greatest educational organizations (.edu) use Drupal.
- It's not a coincidence that sites like the White House, MTV, Economist, Examiner and Ubuntu are Drupal sites.
- It's not a coincidence that Netstudio now only develops in Drupal!
Let's take things from the beginning though. Not only was it my first DrupalCon (or any -con to be precise), it was my first time in London too and the excitement was intense. Two things that need to be noted, was that although my English is rather fluent (or so I want to believe), I had a really hard time when it came to ordering food. The menu's entries look like gibberish to me so most of the time i resigned to American style food. 
Good for me I must say, cause the team's daredevils most of the times never got what they thought they were ordering and were left puzzled! 
The second thing that took me by surprise was that i couldn't - for my life - decide which beer to choose!
Needless to say, we replaced all the water intake we needed with... beer. Hey, it's England after all!
On to the serious stuff though; We then visited Fairfield Halls in East Croydon where we met a crowd of 1800 Drupalers. 
We met the communities greatest personas; we are of course refering to Dries and Webchick. 
We also met our own country's Drupalers, Kostas and Stelios Kourakis (yes, brothers), from PointBlank with whom we discussed many interesting plans and proposals regarding both the spread and growth of Drupal in Greece.
Chit-chat took place in specific pubs where all the DrupalCon-ers were gathered. 
Needless to say, the whole thing also featured entertainment acts, including - but not limited to - beautiful ways on how to... build a module! ...and also the famous Batman theatrical show. 
We were proud to spread the Drupal spirit throughout London with our t-shirts. 
The atmosphere was amazing. We usually went at Albert Hall where the most interesting presentations were held... We tried to attend as many lectures as we could to get the vast majority of info. The most interesting lectures were:
- Keynote: The State of Drupal
- The Path to a Mobile Drupal: Techniques, Tools and Failure
- Data Migration into Drupal
- Easy Drupal Hosting Lifecycle: Local Dev, Production Deploy, Cloud Scale, and Sleep Well.
- The Rules Way of Life
- Building and Maintaining a Distribution in Drupal 7 with Features
- Mad Skillz: Become the Best in the World
- Keynote: Designing the Sustainable Web
- Content Staging and Deployments in Drupal 7
- An Introduction to Form Builder - A New Interface for Fields
- Adaptive, Responsive, Mobile First and Drupal Theming for the Future with HTML5, CSS3 and Omega
By George
Product/Account Manager
Published on 05 Oct 2011