Annertech at Drupal Camp Galway

Last weekend Alan and I both headed to the Galway for DrupalCamp Ireland. The camp took place in DERI which has hosted many previous Drupal Camps. It was great chance to meet fellow Drupal-ers and introduce some new people to the power of Drupal.

Alan and myself both spoke at the event. I gave a presentation about Sass and Compass. Anyone who attended the talk will know that I am rather enthusiastic about both these approaches to creating more maintainable (and beautiful) css. A few people came up to me over the weekend and said they were going to give Sass a try so I am looking forward to hearing how they got on. I also gave a talk about the Drupal modules Context and Panels. I also touched on project Bulter which is a project to provide a new 'context system' in Drupal 8. As someone who has done a lot of work as a site builder I am very interested in the different approaches to architecting Drupal sites in robust and maintainable ways.

Due to some late speaker cancelations Alan had to give quite a few talks at the Camp (I am surprised his voice was not gone by Sunday evening!). On Saturday he gave three talks. He spoke about Drupal deployment best practices using git, Javascript in Drupal 7, and optimizing front-end performance. There were a few nervous faces in the audience during the front-end performance talk as Alan Y-slowed various people's websites!

Alan also spoke on Sunday in his capacity as chairperson of the Drupal Association of Ireland. This was one of the most interesting discussions of the weekend. Everyone exchanged their ideas regarding the role of the Drupal Association of Ireland and the nature of future Irish DrupalCamps. As the day was drawing to a close we had to leave mid-conversation but the discussion is on going on at groups.drupal.org.

All in all it was a great weekend. It is a cliche to talk about how welcoming, supportive, and collaborative the Drupal community but it really is so much fun to be apart of. It was great to catch up with people you have not seen in 6 months and just geek-out. A big thank you to everyone involved! I can't wait of the next Irish Drupal Camp which will be in Derry sometime in the Autumn. Hope to see you there!