Woke up really early (think the whole timezone thing must be messing with me a bit), so I figured I’d check out the gym in the hotel. Surprisingly, many others had the same idea. I got a nice super early workout to start off my day.
Then I walked over to the Colorado Convention Center which featured the opening keynote by Dries, the founder of Drupal. The theatre was massive, and much to my surprise it was practically packed with all the attendees. I’m really interested when they release the final count, it’s gotta be at least 3000+
Then the sessions began.
My first was Drupal Media. This is a very important module to practically all the sites I work with now. It was great to hear all about it and it’s features firsthand. I was pleased to hear of how much they’re committed to it and wil really try to chip in myself to this most noble cause.
Then we had lunch. Thousands were driven like cattle to the food upstairs. It was a lunch in a box (like the shoobies pioneered), and not too bad. In my box was a turkey sandwich (very good on some fine bread), a bag of chips, a big chocolate chip cookie and an apple which I wisely decided to save for later in the day (so glad I did just a few minutes ago). A fine box.
Then I went to my first ever BOF (birds of a feather) session. These are more group discussions than formal sessions. It was pretty cool, the topic was Drupal Trends in Education: Mozilla Badges, Learning Registry and Data.ED.gov. Everyone there seemed to be from education, so I had a good amount in common with most of them. The whole badge idea sounds very promising, but I can’t see the NJEA not somehow shooting in down in fear or something like that.
The Drupal Community: Where Are We Going and How to Get Involved was the next session. This had a much smaller attendance than most the other sessions, but the presenter webchick put on an excellent. The audience seemed very eager to contribute to the community and that’s a thing to see.
The next session, HTML 4S turned out to be much more interesting that I’d imagine it’d be. The presenter was a very animated, foul-mouthed Dane. He was hilarious, though there were times I didn’t quite understand what he said I still found myself cracking up. He was clearly very passionate about what he does, and had some excellent tips and suggestions regarding markup with a strong focus on HTML 5 today.
The final session of the day for me was Webform: The Survey Tool for Drupal. The presenter did a really great job, going over the basics as well as some advanced tips that I will surely put to use. I worried that it might be too basic before attending, but it was perfect and I’m glad that I did.
Then I headed back to the hotel and dropped my stuff off and headed out to grab a bite to eat. I’ll try to check out Denver a bit more tonight and see if there’s anything going on in the Code Lounge later tonight if I’m up to it.