Drupalcon 2007 is complete.  I have some thoughts and reactions.

First off, thanks to the organizers of this conference.  This was the first time I have attended a Drupalcon--I was introduced to Drupal in August of 2006 and only recently began working for pingVision heavily in Drupal--and I thought that it was pretty well organized for the first one to break 200, 300, 400 attendees.

My thoughts come from a Management/PM mind set--not from a Development or Theme mind set.  I think this is appropriate as Drupal is "growing up" and becoming more of a norm in the business world.  It seems that at every turn, more mid-sized organizations are opting for a Drupal solution.

I captured and edited the following video that covers part of the "Feste de la Merce" the evening of the last day of Drupalcon 2007. The drumming is fun and quite cool, but the fireworks are crazy!

Fireworks DIGG THIS

I can't sleep, so I thought I would sit down and write my thoughts about day 4 of the convention.

Yesterday was the last day of the conference.  The first session consisted of Dries giving a talk on the state of Drupal.  As Kevin, Rad, Greg, and I figured it would be a popular session we skipped sitting down for breakfast favouring heading to the Citilab to scope out seats.  We arrived early and shortly after we settled down the rain came heavy and soaking.

Dries session was very interesting.  It was based on a survey that he put up a month earlier.  He had over 1000 respondents, which seems pretty darn good to me.  I will cover the highlights of that presentation in another post on my overall thoughts of Drupal and the Drupal community.

On the third day of Drupalcon I attended quite a few interesting sessions. 

The first session was entitled "What Makes Websites Work? Bringing Information Architecture into the Drupal Development Process." What was nice about this session was its validation of pingVision's process of Drupal development.  The pingVision team has embraced the user-centric methodology and integrated an Agile system of project management into the process.  Basically this means that a client's project is broken up into user stories, descriptions of how the user interacts with the system, which are further broken down into tasks.  These stories enter into an iterative cycle.  Breaking a project down into small chunks allows for easy digestion of large systems and provides a pretty accurate assessment of resources have been consumed and how far the project has proceeded.

The second day of Drupalcon was terrific.  Kevin, Rad, and I started out by going for breakfast at a counter that had pretty much no English skills.  That, by the way, I have found interesting.  English is not spoken very much at all in Spain.  It has given me the desire to go home and learn the language.  Perhaps it is an exercise for me and my daughter to do together.  It was a curious experience at this little restaurant.  Rad asked if they had breakfast to which he was asked, "Do you want a sandwich?"  "No, do you have breakfast on plates?"  This was greeted with a reluctantness.  Finally the lady running the counter told us that we would have "Huevos et Bacon."  I've never been told at a restaurant exactly what it was I going to eat before.

The last few days have been pretty terrific.  They started out strange but got better and better.  I arrived on Tuesday at about 4:30.  The cab driver brought me to the wrong place despite having a GPS unit in his car.  I ended up catching a young couple who called the landlord and determined that the street was broken up into not-attaching pieces.  My flat was beyond two sets of old crumbling walls.  It was a little bit of a walk.  When I got up to the flat, I found that both my colleagues--Rad and Kevin--had waited to go for supper with me.

We found our way downtown and had paella at a little restaurant and then met up with other Drupalers at a sushi restaurant.  It was a nice cross section of folks from newbies all the way up to seasoned veterans like Drupal's creator, Dries.  The restaurant had wi-fi so the three of us went back to the flat to get our laptops.  When we got back, the manager had decided that he had had enough of "geeks" and dictated no more Internet and no more laptops.

Well, it is 5:26 am in Denver and 1:26 pm in Frankfurt. My travels had me leave Denver yesterday at about 3:30 in the afternoon. I flew to Dulles where I got on a plane to Frankfurt late in the evening. The final leg of this bit of travel has me flying from Frankfurt to Barcelona. Approximate travel time from my first stepping on a plane to my stepping off the last plane--15 hours and 15 minutes.

The pingVision crew are flying in three separate volleys to Drupalcon. It has me thinking of the "Amazing Race" where different teams end up on different flight plans. I imagine lines on a map streaking from city to city showing the different routes each group are taking.