DrupalCon DC was Awesome!

Two weeks after heading off to the US and I'm finally back home in Ireland. DrupalCon DC was fantastic and, while I'm glad to be home, part of me wishes it didn't have to end so soon! Twice a year it tantalises me with 4 days of non-stop Drupal talk, learning loads of cool stuff and hanging out with some really amazing people. No wonder I quit my job after DrupalCon Szeged and started Annertech - it's just an awesome community!

Some of the highlights of DrupalCon DC for me were:

• Meeting Karen Stevenson (KarenS), maintainer of the Date, Calendar and CCK modules - I had worked with her on the localizable date formats patch, as part of the Sony project, and it was great to finally meet her in person. Karen - you rule!
• Meeting Jim Berry (solotandem), maintainer of the Deadwood module. We're working on merging Coder and Deadwood modules together for Drupal 7 at the moment, so it was great to be able sit down face to face and have a brain-storming session. New merged module coming soon, so watch this space!
• Meeting other CivicActions folks, including Nathaniel Catchpole (catch), Owen Barton (grugnog2), Trevor Twining and Bevan Rudge (bevan), to name just a few.
• The session by Barry Jaspan & David Strauss on the new Field API in Drupal 7, aka "CCK in core". It looks really great and will be a major benefit to Drupal going forwards.
• I also found the panel session on Usability Testing at the University of Baltimore quite good. It was entertaining in some ways, but scary in others. One thing's for sure - I will certainly be paying more attention to the usability of all the user interfaces I create from now on!
• The Coder module for Drupal 7 sprint that happened on the last day was great. While we had internet connectivity issues and it took us a while to get organised, we did get a lot done. Special thanks to Steve Mokris (smokris) for cloning and re-organizing the Converting 6.x modules to 7.x handbook page into categories and many useful 6.x to 7.x coder rules; and also thanks to Robin Barre (robeano) for her help with the coder rules, testing and for not allowing me to go completely hyper on too much sugar!

There are quite a few sessions I wished I had got to, but unfortunately didn't, including Moshe's and Mike's session on migration (sounds amazing!) and Development Seed's Context and Spaces. Needless to say I'll be busy watching the videos of these sessions online over the coming weeks.

I had an absolutely awesome at DrupalCon DC and am sad that it's all over. All I can say is roll on DrupalCon Paris!