Looking Back at Drupal Downunder

I spent the weekend at Drupal Downunder in Brisbane. The venue was excellent. I’m a fan of not using “traditional” venues for conferences, to help make them even more memorable for attendees.

I managed to catch up with a bunch of people. The relaxed feel about the event was great. Most conferences I’ve attended recently have either been large or I’ve helped organise them, this time I could relax and enjoy.

On the Saturday I presented Building Distributions with Drupal 7, which had a small turn out as I was up against Josh Koenig and his Pantheon presentation. My presentation was hampered by lack of internet connectivity, but I think it went well. I used Lego, Duplo and Quatro blocks to demonstrate the evolution of Drupal distros.

Saturday night involved a pub crawl with various DDU and LCA folks. The highlight of the crawl was the Mana Bar, which is a gamers bar, that has a good collection of retro consoles and games on display.

I spent a fair bit of Sunday in the hallway track. I discussed the D7 port of UUID with Dries, which helped confirm the direction I was heading with it. Several people wanted to discuss my $100 Drupal site blog series. I also gave my Horizontally Scaling Drupal presentation, which was very well attended. Unfortunately due to people torrenting there was no usable internet access for my presentation. I had to skip the post event BBQ so I could fly back to Melbourne.

The lack of mobile signal and wifi made it frustrating to prepare and present. I would have liked to have seen an inclusive social event organised on the Saturday night. Overall I really enjoyed DDU and the organisers are to be congratulated. The vegetarian food options were excellent.

Thanks for Four Kitchens for funding me to get to DDU. I have just started contracting with them, so I really appreciated them covering my trip.