At this year’s DrupalCon 2017 in Baltimore, Maryland, we were proud to lend a voice throughout the week to the ongoing conversation about inclusion and diversity within the Drupal community. It was gratifying to have such a strong showing of Kanopians giving back to the community throughout the event. Not only did we engage with industry representatives and leaders all week in the exhibit hall, but we also sent some of our very own subject matter experts to present, connect, and celebrate with the community as a whole via sessions, the NonProfit Summit, BoF gatherings, and parties.
From handing out super awesome t-shirts to bringing people together with the plants in our booth, Kanopians worked throughout the week to spread the good word about our services. CEO Anne Stefanyk was able to zoom around the exhibit hall (scooter- and broken-ankle-free this year), while our very own Nikki Stevens championed inclusion as a representative at the Drupal Diversity & Inclusion Working Group (DD&I) booth. We’re not the only ones who think Nikki is a rockstar, by the way: on Thursday; she was the recipient of the Aaron Winborn Award, presented annually to an individual who demonstrates personal integrity, kindness, and above-and-beyond commitment to the Drupal community.
Anne and Nikki were able to bring their expertise to sessions as well; Anne presented on subjects ranging from affordable UX to Creating a Culture of Engagement, and Nikki presented in sessions and panels targeted toward Drupal Diversity. We wrapped up each day with parties and gatherings sponsored by our friends Acquia, Digital Ambit, Hook42, Kalamuna, Four Kitchens, Kwall, and especially Pantheon and Lullabot’s Official DrupalCon party at the Maryland Science Center (complete with Dinosaurs)!
It was exciting to come together with a group of individuals who all seemed to put such a premium on the value of other professionals. Thank you to all of the sponsors, organizers volunteers, and our community. See you in Nashville in 2018!
Photo courtesy of Michael Cannon
Weren’t able to see our DrupalCon 2017 sessions in person? No worries – you can see them here:
A big, warm and well-deserved congratulations to Nikki Stevens, Kanopi Studios’ Senior Drupal Architect, and this year’s recipient of the 2017 Aaron Winborn Award. Known as “the Academy Award” of the Drupal Association, this annual honor recognizes an individual who demonstrates personal integrity, kindness, and above-and-beyond commitment to the Drupal community.
Nikki spearheads an ongoing conversation on equality and diversity, citing inclusion as an essential component of both. She founded the Drupal Diversity & Inclusion Group, an independent, volunteer-run collection of community-managed diversity initiatives. Guided by the “Nothing About Us, Without Us” philosophy, she works directly with the Drupal community through crowdsourcing to improve initiatives such as the Diversity of the Web community-drafted survey.
Nikki Steven presenting her session “Dogooding 101” at the 2016 Bay Area Drupal Camp.
Nikki has shown herself to be a pioneering tour-de-force, raising awareness of and encouraging conversations about diversity, equality, and inclusion among all people who build and create the internet. It is an honor to work and play alongside you, Nikki! Congrats on your Aaron Winborn Award!
Who’s stoked to talk about Drupal 8? How about reuniting with colleagues and friends in the incredible Drupal community? Learning from the pros (like us!) at amazing new sessions? Crab cakes?
That’s right, it’s the big event of the year: DrupalCon Baltimore. And if you’re as excited as we are, make sure you stop by our booth #434 and we’ll give you a super soft t-shirt you can wear all weekend (or use as a pillow after a 24-hour sprint).
The Drupal Diversity & Inclusion Working Group (DD&I) was formed after DrupalCon New Orleans and has spent the last year working to build a more inclusive, diverse and respectful Drupal Community. Nikki and Ruby will review the successes (and challenges) of 2016 and share plans for 2017. Ideas welcome!
We want your voice! Join our very own Nikki Stevens and co-presenter Ruby Sinreich as they lead a discussion on how we can improve our community through greater diversity and inclusion. All are welcome to take part in the conversation on Tuesday, April 25th at 1 pm in Room 318 to learn more about DD&I.
In the last few years, “engagement” has replaced “wellness” as the catch-all employee retention buzzword. But what is engagement, exactly? Is it more than creating a killer office space, complete with foosball table and inflatable T-Rex?
Kanopi founder Anne Stefanyk lifts the curtain on what it really takes to engage employees. Learn how to build a cultural rapport of give and take, and foster a community in which team members become an active part of a brand’s forward momentum.
Heading to the first ever Nonprofit Summit at DrupalCon Baltimore?
New this year! At this one-day Nonprofit Summit, you will connect with other nonprofit Drupal users, learn best practices, discover the newest trends, and be inspired to keep doing your best work for causes that matter.
Check out Kanopi founder Anne Stefanyk’s breakout session at 12:30 pm on Monday, April 24th in room 309.
Did you know? 70% of the top 100 universities use Drupal*
Calling all education Drupalers! Join Kanopi’s Justin Rhodes at DrupalCon’s one-day Higher-Ed Summit. From learning management systems to digital asset managers to web applications to marketing websites — learn how other schools “do Drupal.” The event will kick-off with a panel, followed up with breakout discussions and case studies from leaders in the industry.
Exploring the issues that matter most to the Drupal community
Join Kanopi’s Nikki Stevens at the Community Summit, a one-day UnConference.
If you’re a Drupal-lover interested in community, this event is for you. The Community Summit will help you build a stronger community, whether you need help maintaining a long-standing camp or User Group, you’re new to the Drupal community and want to get more involved, or you have an awesome success story to share! Everyone is welcome to learn, connect, and build a better community together. See you at DrupalCon Baltimore!
I was excited to attend NTC 2017 for the first time as a member of the Kanopi Family. For one thing, it was held in my hometown, Washington, DC – such a great town for making connections with nonprofits – there are so many here, large and small, it would be impossible to count them all! But this event also brought me together with two people from my work family, only known to me previously as video images from my computer screen – CEO Anne Stefanyk, and Executive Assistant Darlyne Dolap. These two ladies and I partner on so many things, day to day – I was excited to do so in person. After remarking how tall (or short) everyone was, we got to work setting up our booth, and prepping for the conference.
This is our third year participating in NTC, and our second year as a booth exhibitor. Amy Sample Ward, Andrea Post, Eileigh Doineau and the entire Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) staff did an amazing job organizing this year’s conference, which unites North American tech-based companies like Kanopi with nonprofits from all over the country. It’s a great way to make connections, form partnerships, or simply learn the best ways to help nonprofits harness technology to gain donors, gather volunteers, and spread their missions as broadly as possible. Darlyne and I manned the booth, making sure to get the word out (while admiring the array of collectible buttons and stickers throughout), while Anne worked the room (this year without a broken ankle) to connect with old friends and partners and make new ones.
In addition to attending conference sessions on everything from Content Engagement to Accessibility, Leveraging Drupal in Marketing Strategies to Why We Chose WordPress, Anne represented Kanopi at two Drupal BoFs (Birds of a Feather gatherings), where she was able to informally talk shop over lunch. The three of us spent time together outside of the conference, attending some of the amazing industry parties, sponsored by Jackson River, MotherJones, and Wire Media.
A huge thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth at NTC 2017 to say hello and to discuss how Kanopi can help their organizations build and support a new or existing online presence. It was amazing to discuss potentially teaming up with so many incredible organizations. Plus – seems our re-usable screen cleaners, stickers, and t-shirts were a hit!
We look forward to staying in touch with everyone we met, possibly adding some more members to our “family” of clients and partners, and heading down to the Big Easy for #18NTC in NoLA next year. Learn more about how Kanopi can help nonprofits by contacting us today!
Hey DrupcalCon Baltimore attendees! Come to Booth 434 to meet awesome peeps from Kanopi!
Planning to attend the Bay Area Drupal Camp in 2017? Kanopi is involved in the planning and execution of the event – come be a part of it!
Drupal conferences, generally speaking, are the best way of following Drupal development; they offer a far deeper perspective than what one might learn just by going online. Although I’ve been attending sessions on Drupal 8 at conferences for three years now, the 2017 Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit (2017 PNW) in Vancouver was the first time for me that it felt like we were talking about D8 as a mature product rather than an upcoming product. For me, this was a marked experience. Given that I’ve attended many sessions on various aspects of Drupal 8 for years, these sessions felt more technically advanced than at any other Drupal conference I’ve attended (D8 or otherwise, including previous PNW Summits). Casually sharing space at the bowling alley with Drupal heroes like webchick further underscored this feeling. I was grateful just to be there.
Kanopian Paul Sheldrake speaking on Pattern Lab in Drupal 8
Not only is Vancouver my old stomping ground, one of 2017 PNW’s sponsors was Affinity Bridge, a company I once worked for, so the conference was a nice link for me between my recent past and present. It was great seeing old Affinity Bridge friends, and with the conference taking place very near to Affinity Bridge’s office, there was a surreal sense of continuity for me, a sense of my karmic place in the Drupal universe.
Given that Kanopi is a fully-distributed company, it was incredible, as always, to connect with Kanopians in real-life. I was feeling lower key than usual, but that didn’t stop me from having a great time simply hanging out with the crew. We talked work, and we talked non-work, striking a good balance, and deepening that sense that I am working with people that I will be working with for a long time. On the Friday, Kanopi introduced to our Slack chats the HeyTaco! plugin — a fun way to thank your co-workers by awarding them virtual tacos. THEN on the Saturday, we ate REAL tacos — literally the best I’ve ever had — at an amazing restaurant, Rogue Kitchen. It was a small, but very clear synchronicity which just seemed to tie up for me the sense that everything in my corner of the Drupal universe is going perfectly.
Some further insights from my colleague:
“Because we work at a distributed company, my favorite part of most camps is getting to connect with my coworkers in person, but the highlight of this one was watching one of my Kanopi teammates, Paul, totally rock his first ever presentation!”
DrupalCamp Florida is an annual event, and I was lucky enough to be chosen as a speaker. I’ve been to many Drupal Camps across the United States, and although this was not my first rodeo with DrupalCamp Florida, this camp, in particular, is among my favorites.
It’s obvious that organizers have been hard at work putting the camp together. Start to finish, DrupalCamp Florida is a polished, professional experience. More than 250 attendees arrive to experience the Drupal community at its finest. With a full schedule of sessions covering a broad range of topics tailored to the needs of attendees, it’s the perfect destination for those who want to make connections and expand their knowledge base.
Florida Technical College
This campus set the backdrop for DrupalCamp Florida.
In 2017 and years past, this beautiful Orlando, Florida campus provides an in-kind sponsorship, making services and facilities available to the event and its attendees.
Photo credit: https://www.fldrupal.camp
Skywalker the Alligator
In true Florida fashion, there was an alligator in attendance. His name was Skywalker and was a big hit with the crowd!
Photo credit: Chris Zietlow
Photo Credit: Will Jackson
Genius Bar
This concept was borrowed from other open source camps and serves as a BOF-life follow up to the session. During the 30-minute intersession period, attendees were able to keep the discussion flowing, or follow up with further questions regarding session topics.
Sessions Attended
Docker in a Flash: An Introduction to Drupal Development with Docker
This was my presentation topic, and the first time I’d presented it to a DrupalCamp audience. I created this session because I feel that the use of Docker can dramatically expedite developer onboarding, both with projects and by removing a lot of the challenges that developers face when configuring local development environments.
Several sessions during the camp focused on Docker. It seemed that the majority of the audience were not yet familiar with the idea of using Docker as a primary component of their development workflow.
I was able to take advantage of the Genius Bar to follow up with a few particular questions from audience members and demonstrate a new script I have been working on to create Docker containers; importing sites from Pantheon to automatically configure local development environments.
My session was well received, and several audience members provided positive feedback.
The Drupal 8 Theming Experience
looking forward to this session as an introduction to the theming layer of Drupal 8 and what to expect coming from Drupal 7. Scott “Cottser” Reeves not only demonstrated new additions to Drupal 8 theming workflows but proved himself to be a fantastic speaker. Attending his session, I gained the confidence needed to start my next Drupal 8 theming project.
Making Use Of Our Robot Overlords — Automating Your DevOps Workflows
I have a deep fascination with automating all of the things, so I was particularly excited to attend this session. I was not disappointed!
Tools and demonstrations on nearly every aspect continuous delivery and DevOps automation packed this session.
Lightning Talks
A “lightning talk” is an impromptu session lasting only five minutes. The presenter is expected to take five minutes to present on any topic related to Drupal. All of the lightning talks I attended were interesting. However, the one that stuck out the most was Marc Drummond’s hilarious lightning talk on How to Extend a Casserole. Watch the video.
After Party
Photo credit: http://www.fkorlando.com
Photo credit: http://www.fkorlando.com
Every Camp needs an after party! Firkin & Kegler Family Entertainment Center, which boasts a full arcade and cosmic bowling alley, provided the perfect venue to unwind at the end of DrupalCamp Florida, 2017. The DrupalCamp crew met upstairs in “The Loft” – enjoying drinks sponsored by Kanopi Studios and Code Journeyman. We used this final time together to network, interact, and have fun with peers in the Drupal Community.
A major reason people choose Drupal as their technological focus is its community. It’s not just that the community is active; it’s also the specific awesomeness of this community. Back in 2008, I attended a Drupal Camp in Vancouver, and was immediately struck by the alternative, seemingly non-corporate, almost punk-like demographic in attendance. I felt right at home! The internet has always been for me, an extension of a mindset that seeks to change the world, not just replicate it. For me, Drupal was a vital representation of this. Where geeks and punks meet – that’s where I want to be.
I dove right in. Pacific Northwest (PNW) Drupal Summits became an annual ritual. At these summits, I would often hear about BADCamp, a Drupal conference held in the California Bay Area – the hub of both the counterculture and tech culture. Whenever someone mentioned BADCamp, there was an air of mystery about it, an insinuation of something more than just a conference. The details of this would only become clear to me this year, when in 2016 Kanopi Studios graciously sponsored my attendance.
BADCamp is one part conference and one part party. Consider it a tech conference with a higher-than-usual concentration of freaks (my catch-all phrase for punks, hippies, hipsters, anarchists and/or vegans), or conversely, a festival like Burning Man with a concentration of Drupal geeks. That’s right – it’s the ultimate geeks meets freaks.
For the freaks
First of all, there was a ring of free pinball machines right in the in the middle of the sponsor expo. My personal favourite was Junk Yard, though I never did figure out why there was an un-wrecked Volkswagen hippy van in there, other than to serve as countercultural reference in this blog post.
Next, we have drinking. And not just any drinking. But drinks like “Drush and Stormy” and “GIT-let”, with drink tickets spilling out of our pockets.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Hey mixing fun times with tech is nothing unique to BADCamp!”. Well that’s true. Beer and Drupal, at least judging by the PNW Summits, have been good buddies for a long time. But, have you ever assembled a Burning Man-sanctified, playa-dusted, geodesic dome on the roof of a campus building, whilst the Dead Kennedys blared on the stereo, under a Friday afternoon California sun? Speaking of roofs, there were a lot of them – some sneaky, some not-so-sneaky, but always roofs-with-a-view. The Bay Bridge seen through a roof-based telescope is recommended. And speaking of the geodesic dome, free shoulder massages therein! And what could be more alternative than tarot readings and a stack of crystals also therein? All of this, and the party highlight for me, had to be the Pantheon-organized Saturday night afterparty, which involved a surreptitious gathering on top of a hill with a magnificent view of the city. I felt like I was in the movies or something. I was so blissed out that I forgot to partake in the ramen noodles. Yup, ramen noodles. Now that’s hip! It felt like Burning Man at a Drupal conference…. so what about the tech?
For the geeks
Here, I’ll just summarize some key takeaways from certain sessions that I attended. These are backend development and sys-op takeaways, with a little dip into frontend development. In addition to the regular Saturday and Sunday sessions, BADCamp offered themed summits as well as training sessions on the Thursday and Friday. The training sessions are high-quality offerings typically costing money, yet offered for free at BADCamp.
I took a training session, Mastering Drupal 8 Development. I’ve learned bits and pieces of D8 through the PNW Summits, but finally, I found the on-ramp to the freeway that is D8. The instructors were none other than the developers of the Drupal Console, a profoundly impressive piece of architecture that revolutionizes the Drupal developer’s life, much the way Drush did. The Console builds boilerplate code for D8 modules, routes, pages, forms, services and more. Given how much more complex D8 boilerplate is than D7’s, this is hugely helpful – it’s the on-ramp part of the freeway analogy. I was up and running in D8 with a sense of power. The Console is a must-have for any D8 backend developer.
I’m a backend developer, not a frontend developer, but nevertheless, it was recommended that I take the 21 things I learned with Twig & Drupal session for the hilarity factor alone. One particular slide I’ll always remember – a screenshot showing D7 theming layer code generating HTML div-nested about 30 levels deep. Themers will find that funny, infuriation notwithstanding. The whole room was laughing. Front-enders in particular, are enthralled with what Twig has to offer over the hackish D7 theming layer. A key takeaway from this session is that the presenter, a fan of rock band Rush, with a Danish accent that made him sound like Lars Ulrich (Metallica drummer), has been formally tasked with the development of the Drupal 8 theme. What D8 ships with now is essentially D7 themes, not making use of Twig. The real D8 theme will be called Eleven (partly a Spinal Tap reference), and will be coming out in about year.
I took another session offered by the developers of the Drupal Console, Learn the new things in Drupal 8 via debugging. Here, we examined the other half of the powerful functionality offered by the Console — debugging. This is debugging unlike run-time debugging offered by xdebug. It is Drupal-specific, and is it ever powerful! Tools like this feel like Christmas to me. There is much to choose from, but one example is the command “drupal router:debug,” which displays all the current routes for the site (all paths with corresponding machine names), with the ability to drill down deeper into any route. Nothing like this existed in D7. I turned to my co-worker and chuckled that the whole conference was worth it for learning about this alone.
Speaking of Christmas, I also learned about the command line tool, Peco. Pipe your commands to Peco, instead of grep, and you have a live, interactive filtering tool on the results. All the times I piped a command to vi when grep wasn’t good enough, and yet vi wasn’t good enough either – goodbye. This is yet another tool to make any self-respecting backend developer a command line fanboy/girl.
Another session I was able to attend was: Deep dive into D8 through Single Sign-On Example. I loved this session for being super well-structured. It was perfectly organized and well-paced to put into practice my new D8 development knowledge. It is just what the write-up says it is.
I’m also a sys-op guy, and I closed out my weekend with Drupal Performance Census – Lessons From Over 2500 Sites. This session was delivered by one of the Pantheon founders, the value being that he had many Drupal sites to run through some performance analyses. Pantheon has installed New Relic on their servers, with performance analysis that runs all the way from cross-site aggregate stats to individual site performance stack traces. Since New Relic is cross-site, it offers excellent overall analysis, unlike xhprof’s analysis on individual sites. These graphs provided excellent insight into Drupal performance. Even if you’re already a Drupal performance expert, I recommend watching the session video for a good summation of the situation. One particular topic mentioned in the session blurb, but not covered, was D8 vs. D7 performance. The presenter felt that D8 uptake was not yet significant enough to provide statistically significant metrics on this, but I asked him after the session for a general opinion. He cautiously suggested that a fresh, simple D8 site will perform slightly slower than a fresh, simple D7 site, due to its higher overhead. Having said this, he also felt that once you start getting deeper into the build, a D8 site will show significant performance gains (increasing with complexity) due to the advanced architecture. Another takeaway from this session was to look for Big Pipe in D8. This simply means the displaying of certain parts of the web page before others, while the page loads. This is something that a site like Facebook has been doing for a while, and is now something that we can do in D8. This improvement greatly increases the perceived performance for the end-user. A final personal takeaway from this session came about when I mentioned that I didn’t see anything in the performance graphs mentioning opcode caching. The presenter said that all graphs assume that opcode caching is always on – not only because Pantheon always has it on, but because every Drupal site always should have it on. Now, this is something I already knew, but like much taken in at conferences, it’s the drilling of the point home, that is of value. So Drupal sys-ops everywhere, take note – if you don’t have opcode caching enabled, there’s absolutely no reason you should not. Big gains for free! Formally a manual affair with APC, starting in PHP 5.5, it is built-in – but depending on your distribution, it is disabled by default through 5.6. As of 5.7 is it enabled by default. Turn it on, baby!
Goodbye, Berkeley!
Every time I go to a Drupal conference, I feel revived. BADCamp was exceptionally awesome. We squeezed all the goodness into a jam-packed 4-days, and the only consequence was sleep dep. There was little time after my last session before my flight, so I walked back through the streets of Berkeley – that hotbed of 60s revolutionary spirit, with live Latin music and dancers in the street, feeling like I was leaving a lover, to return to my nature home on Vancouver Island, another lover. Yes, geographically, I am polyamorous. But it’s all coastal! I am Drupal coastal.
WordCamp Seattle is one of my favorite WordCamps. Seattle has a bit of a different take on things, which I always appreciate, and of course, the city is beautiful with lots to do (if you can squeeze it in!).
This year, WordCamp Seattle was a two-day affair that took place on the weekend of October 29th – 30th. There were special, longer events such as a Workshop for Beginners, a KidsCamp Workshop, and a Contributor Day. Day One kicked off with a special keynote from Chris Lema, a well-known voice in the WordPress community. Chris challenged us to “unlearn” a few things – he encouraged us to ignore the life lesson of “Don’t Talk to Strangers”. He explained that at a WordCamp, the most valuable part can be talking to strangers and turning them into new friends.
After the keynote, you were directed to two rooms (if you weren’t in a workshop) with sessions that covered a range of topics/audiences including beginners, users, developers, community, business, content/marketing, usability & performance. I was perhaps most excited about a session on “Names, Versions, Releases, and SVN”, but that’s just me. I also got a lot out of a session on “Drawing with SVG” and “Using a CDN to Speed Up Your Website”.
This was my third time attending WordCamp Seattle, and my second time speaking there. My topic was listed as “CSS Sanity with Sass,” but the full title of my session was “CSS Sanity with Sass: The Inverted Triangle Approach.” My time slot was the second session on Sunday morning, making it the only “Developer” talk of the day. I was thrilled with the number of folks that showed up to listen, which I estimate to be about 50 (did anyone count?). During my session, we talked about Sass itself, and how to get started with it. Most of the talk, however, was on the Inverted Triangle Approach to organizing Sass, or plain CSS, for that matter. There were plenty of questions, and several people even caught me in the hallway to further the discussion.
OK, that was the business part of the trip. Now, can I talk about seeing the Star Trek 50 exhibit at the EMP Museum? Or, attending the Sounders playoff game (which they won 3-0)? Oh, the boss is listening? Shhhhh…
I highly recommend taking the time to attend a WordCamp, any WordCamp! Hundreds of camps take place each year, in places all around the globe. Fees are so reasonable that most people can afford to attend – but if you can’t afford it, volunteer at a local camp! It’s one of the best personal/professional development opportunities you’ll find. Check this out to find a WordCamp near you.
♫ “Just an Admin Girl, Living in a Drupal World…” ♫
Find out how the Magic of BADCamp 2016 transformed this non-developer into a Drupal Believer, without any coding whatsoever!
First of all, I am not a developer. I am also not technical by any stretch of the imagination. If my future self magically traveled back in time to tell my past self that I would be working for a company that will immerse me into the culture of this open source platform called Drupal, I would not have believed it. Now, present-day self works for Kanopi Studios, a design and development agency that offers full website builds and support. I am the Executive Assistant to Anne Stefanyk, who is Kanopi Studios’ fearless CEO, spearheader of the Bay Area Drupal Camp, and the Beyoncé of Drupal. Because of my customer service skills, social media experience and overall ability to execute tasks, I was sent on a plane from Vancouver, British Columbia (I’m Canadian, eh!) to the 2016 Bay Area Drupal Camp (affectionately known as BADCamp) in Berkeley, California on special assignment. My mission: to welcome the community at our sponsorship booth, and connect people to our brand and company culture. This is my third conference “working the booth” for Kanopi, and I must say, BADCamp has a very different feel from the previous conferences I attended. It felt like a family reunion, believe-it-or-not, and the adoption rate of newbies into the community was very high. I was literally floating happily in a sea of drupal drops.
If I could summarize (in bullet form) my experience of the magic that was BADCamp from my non-tech perspective, it goes as follows:
Community-Oriented andSuper Inclusive: I met so many friendly, open-hearted folks.
HuggableHumans: see aforementioned bullet!
Rock Star Teammates: we are a fully distributed company, so this was an amazing opportunity to meet my fellow Kanopians, face-to-face in person.
Inspiring Developers: wicked awesome wizards and sorceresses that work hard and play even harder.
Strong Female Presence: it was amazing to meet and work with some pretty awesome ladies – our Kanopi Team alone, has an impressive roster of women in leadership, design and development engineering.
Free T-shirts: who doesn’t love awesome swag? And in ladies small sizes?? I felt included!
Pinball Machines: ‘nuff said.
Inspiring Talks and Free Education: my developer co-workers had the opportunity to up their game and attend world-class training sessions, otherwise chargeable at larger conferences, keeping them on the cusp of cutting-edge coding.
Lively parties: oh my goodness were the organizers generous… fun space themes (The Red Planet Reception hosted by Kalamuna, Hook42, and Rolling Orange had a dancing robot – here is video proof), creative beverages (the Big Bad BADCamp Pantheon Party served yummy drinks called Drush & Stormy, Cucumber GIT-let and Bulleit Workflow), gorgeous city views (at the Magical Mystical Ramen After Party we sat atop a grassy knoll overlooking the twinkling city lights below, and oh yes! Ramen was served as promised), and such positive people – it was truly celebratory!
There is a Drupal adage phrased as “Come for the Code, Stay for the Community”, and boy does that describe this culture to a “T”. It is this vibrant and welcoming community that makes BADCamp so special. My understanding, is that Drupal is such a cool platform because of all its customizable features and CMS strengths, as well as the fact that it is totally open-source so anyone can learn. Anyone. Even me, if I were so inclined. Adding to Drupal’s appeal, is that one can expand their knowledge and skills in this super cool community that loves to give back to the very thing that brought them careers, opportunities and lifelong friendships. Since FOMO1 was definitely not an option for me, I didn’t mind so much that sleep was virtually non-existent during my time at BADCamp, because the value of togetherness and community most certainly outweighed a fluffy pillow that can’t hug you back; the BADCamp community is exactly like that: a great big Drupally hug.
So Kanopi, thanks for including this gal on this magical foray, and to Future Self: Ok, yes I totally believe you… I have been Drupalized.
♫ Don’t stop believing, hold on to that feeling … street lights, Drupal-oh-oh-OH! ♫
