BTMash

Over this past weekend (August 6 and 7, 2011), the LA Drupal User Group held its annual Drupal Camp. There were 55 sessions planned over the 2 days by various members of the LA Drupal community (with a few by those visiting LA just for this camp ^_^). I don't know what to say that hasn't been said by more eloquent bloggers but it was a whole lot of fun :D

This camp is the first time I decided to really step up and just try and present on anything/everything that interested me (and hopefully others out there). The number ended up being quite large and I did lose my voice by the end of it. But as someone who is trying to give more back to the project that has provided me with a lot, I think it is important to try and ensure others around you experience the same growth in knowledge and experience so they can pass it on to others (I'm thinking specifically of a bedtime story "Do pass it on" though I forget the name of the author).

This camp was also the first time I had been invited to be a part of a panel (I was in one panel on Drupal Module development and in a Q&A session on Drupal 7) and I had no idea it would be so much fun. The audience asked many interesting questions even though some did end up asking

I've been hearing about drupal 8...should I wait for it?

It was also relieving to be able to give my own perspective and to see some of the fellow panelists agree with me. I *finally* feel like "hey, I just might know some stuff about Drupal. Great success!".

Other great moments involved seeing friends stand up and do presentations this year as well. That, and presenting on ctools (ok, I had a very small part since we ran out of time ^_~) in front of Earl Miles (well...that was more on the scary side though learning some things from him on what is happening in CTools was awesome). Seeing some of the projects others are working on is also quite interesting as I do get more approaches on how I could handle certain tasks in the web applications I build out.

Below are list of sessions that I participated in:

• The power of Display Suite (D7 and D6) (little involvement other than answering some questions)
• Drupal Development Q&A Panel
• Drupal 7 Q&A Panel
• Drupal frontend performance and scalability
• Drupal backend performance and scalability
• Migrate BoF - I wish I had given Tommy more time on this one since he was presenting on the Feeds module and he is quite good with it (and I wanted to learn more about it) :)
• Typography options with Drupal
• Understanding CTools - and epic BoF (little involvement other than a rushed job in trying to show how to use the multistep wizard)

The screencasts and/or pdfs should be linked to from the pages above (as a note, the panels and the bofs were not recorded due to the nature of a bof (aside from migrate - the presentation material from another time I presented on it is up)) and I hope you find them useful.

A large amount of thanks go to the sponsors and organizers of the camp without whom none of this would have really happened.