My first DrupalCon: Speaking, learning and exploring Rotterdam

This was my first ever DrupalCon and also my first event abroad. As if that wasn't exciting enough, I was also speaking at DrupalCon with my amazing partner in crime, Mikaela!

And throughout the event, we kept wondering how on earth our talk had been selected. Our impostor syndrome was definitely working overtime.

We didn't attend the summits or contribution day because we spent those days travelling, but we got to enjoy both days filled with sessions. And what an experience it was!

Travelling to Rotterdam

On Monday, September 28, we headed off to the airport just before noon. It was nice to travel during the daytime so that we got proper sleep. The plane was a bit late, but other than that, the travel went smoothly. We flew from Helsinki to Amsterdam, and from there we took a train to Rotterdam. The scenery was really something. We saw lots of cows. And a few times we wondered if we had come to Venice because we saw houses next to a river with boats in their backyards. Really beautiful.

Once in Rotterdam, we knew that our hotel would be relatively close by. I did find it a bit funny that there was construction work going on outside of our hotel because there has also been construction going on outside our apartment. So it felt like home to wake up to construction sounds. And because we weren't really sure how to get around the construction area to reach our hotel, we ended up walking quite a bit further than necessary. But we did learn the best route from the hotel to the event venue, so that was the only time we took such a long detour. On the plus side, we did see more of the city because of the little detour.

Rotterdam was quite a bit warmer than Finland at this time of year. And even though I did try to take that into account, the humidity combined with the warmth was a bit much for me. I tried to drink enough water, but I'm quite sure I was dehydrated the whole journey.

The DrupalCon experience

I felt it was really nice to be able to get familiar with the venue and our session space during the first day. This made me a bit less anxious about our session because the venue was familiar by then.

The event started with a bang; we were sitting in the conference room and all of a sudden there was a live band in the room telling us to get up and dance. That was a really fun start for the event. Though I must admit that if I had known about it beforehand, I would have used my earplugs to reduce the sensory load. But still, I enjoyed it a lot.

And then we got to hear DriesNote. My first ever live DriesNote. And it was such a motivating and inspiring one once again. Because Dries talked a bit about how Drupal's reputation is so much behind the current state of Drupal. Some people still judge Drupal for Drupal 7 things (or even earlier). Or think about how hard the Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 transition was. But these are so far in the past... the current Drupal is a very different entity.

Then we were able to attend several really interesting and thought-provoking sessions throughout the day. And the first day ended with Women in Drupal awards. It was really nice to see the amazing women highlighted, who are such a big part of the Drupal community!

The venue was filled with various stands that had a lot of interesting swag as well as really nice people to talk with. I was even able to get a pet collar for Lumia and Elli. There was a machine to carve names into various metal options. I picked a black heart for Lumia and a really badass red pirate cat for Elli the next day. We also asked if we could get one for our supervisor. They agreed. We wanted to show some appreciation because we got to attend the event, and we did think it could be a fun little souvenir.

Our talk was before lunch on the second day. We took the morning easy so that we weren't in a rush. We were both excited and anxious about presenting. And we were glad that the room was a bit more intimate; I don't know how I would have coped on the huge main stage! We've now presented together a few times with Mikaela, both at Exove and at events. And I think we are finding our tone of voice. We try switching things up and improving things all the time. It's one of the things I enjoy most about collaborating with Mikaela. This was our first session without any familiar faces in the audience, which likely made the event a bit more nerve-racking. I think the session went well, but of course there were some mistakes we made that we immediately started going through together. But I think that is normal, and I'm sure everyone has these since we are humans and not robots.

After our session, we were able to be more relaxed and enjoy the rest of the sessions. We did take a small break in the afternoon because our brains just couldn't process more.

Luckily, the videos of all sessions will be available later, so we get to watch all the sessions we missed. On both days, there were several interesting sessions going on at the same time, and you can only attend one live.

The people putting the DrupalCon together did a fantastic job! The sessions were great, the people were wonderful, and it felt so good to be a part of it. I truly felt like I was part of the Drupal community, even though my contributions to it are very limited.

Drupal features that excited me

I was able to attend only one of the Drupal Canvas sessions. But Drupal Canvas sounds really amazing. Especially now that it has language support. I've been wanting to try it out for a while now, because I've seen Lauri Timmanee talk about it before. Drupal Canvas is definitely one of the newer Drupal things I'm the most excited about!

Drupal Canvas brings a more visual, component-based approach to building and managing pages in Drupal. Nowadays we've been using the Paragraphs module quite often to provide something like this, but the module is not as flexible. And I know that some content editors have struggled a bit with this, so I'm really curious to try these out and see if they would help our clients with their needs.

It supports building components with React, which could make it easier for developers without much Drupal experience to contribute. At least I commonly hear complaints about PHP. And Canvas gives much more freedom to the content editors, which I know a lot of people really want and need.

And Canvas as a headless backend is another interesting possibility. Drupal has been a good headless CMS already, but being able to use Canvas in a headless solution is great. While Canvas itself does bring much more modern approaches to Drupal theming, headless does allow you to use Next or Astro as well. There are some others supported already as well, but those two I personally use.

Another interesting thing is Drupal AI. Nowadays everything is AI, but based on what I hear, Drupal has some interesting possibilities with it. Hopefully I'll get to try that one out in a client project as well. Client projects are the ones where we get to challenge ourselves more than in any personal projects. At least that is the case for me.

And the Drupal CMS approach to Drupal does also sound interesting! I tried it once when it was announced to see what it felt like, but nowadays it has so much more to offer already. Can't wait to try it out once again at some point. The idea in Drupal CMS is to make Drupal easier to use for marketers, designers and content creators. I really like that. And Drupal CMS also uses Drupal Canvas, and it has the AI tools available. I like the idea that they aim to make Drupal really easy to set up and use. Because in the past, Drupal has had a reputation of not being the easiest to get started with.

Experiences in Rotterdam

One thing we immediately noticed is that there really is a lot of effort put into cycling infrastructure. Usually you have to watch out for cars... but in Rotterdam we were constantly trying not to get run over by bicycles! What we found terrifying was that there weren't really very many helmets on the cyclists... and they did go quite fast. We are so used to having our helmets on, we felt a bit scared for them.

We didn't have much time to go sightseeing, but we did visit the Cube houses and the Markthal. The Markthal was packed with different restaurants, so it took us quite a while to check all the options out.

We also walked a bit around the venue and hotel area. The city was really nice.

And one important task we had was to try to find a Miffy for Mikaela's children. We did manage to find two nice ones, though not exactly the ones we were looking for. We also took photos of the Miffys travelling, so that when the children received their Miffys, they could see where they had been. Taking Miffy pictures was another fun part of the journey.

Travelling home

I bought myself a little Miffy head from the airport. One has to have a Miffy! Especially because Miffy was the DrupalCon mascot.

We were able to stay in the lounge at the airport because my card gets me two free lounge visits a year. It was such a nice way to wait. There was much less noise, and of course there was something to eat and drink as well. And the Miffys were enjoying some drinks and food at the lounge with us.

Afterthoughts

After I got home, I almost immediately noticed I was getting sick. I was expecting that because of the stress of the event and travel. But I still could have done without it! It's now been a bit over a week, and I'm still not fully recovered.

While I was super tired after the whole event, I'm so glad I got to go! Especially with Mikaela. We had such a great time, and we were constantly coming up with ideas and things we need to take forward when we get back to work. This is one of the things that I enjoy the most... being able to throw ideas around with someone and come up with exciting new things.

I can't wait to watch the sessions I missed. And I hope this won't be my only live DrupalCon. They did announce that next year DrupalCon Europe will be in Scotland.

And I'll try to do my part in getting Drupal's reputation up to date. You don't have to like Drupal (though personally it's hard for me to understand why you wouldn't), but I would love to see people base their thoughts and opinions on the current state. I think it's a bit unfair to judge Drupal for something that hasn't been true for 10 years.

Once the DrupalCon sessions are publicly available, I'd recommend checking out the sessions! Well, obviously there is an excellent session by two amazing Finnish Drupalists that you should definitely not miss! So at least watch "Hidden Skills of Development: Practical Building Blocks for Team Health". Luckily, you cannot likely read that I'm mostly joking... though I am truly proud of our session and I do really think we talked about important things! But the impostor troll is whispering in my ear again.

But all kidding aside, at least listen to the DriesNote and check out what other sessions are available. And even if you aren't a Drupalist for some reason, there are some more general topics as well that might be beneficial to you, such as UX, AI, accessibility and lots more.