From August 20th to 24th, Drupal users and experts from all over the world visited Munich for DrupalCon Europe 2012. Among them, Markus and I. Since we do what we can to be a good community member, we backed the event as a Bronze Sponsor. And boy, did we get something for our money!

Let me put it first that the organization team did an amazing job, in front of and during the conference. They chose the Westin Grand Hotel and the nearby Sheraton as venues for all the talks, show floors and group meetings. It didn’t take long after arriving to notice that this was a very good choice. Not only was there enough space for almost 2000 conference visitors but the hotel staff also mastered the logistics of providing everyone at any time with coffee, water and food. There seemed to be a food table and coffee stand at every corner and I never saw a queue worth mentioning. The food was so great in terms of both quality and variety that I didn’t dare to get on my scale for the following week. There were a few weak points, too, for example the badly ventilated “Garmisch” conference room in the basement.

Another great idea was to merge the conference bagde with the program guide. If you wanted to see what was going to be on next, you conveniently flipped open the booklet on your chest.

The most important part of DrupalCon is, of course, the sessions. This time, they were divided into the following topic tracks:*Coding and Development

• Community
• Frontend
• Business and Strategy
• Sitebuilding
• DevOps

Additionally, you could take part in the Core Conversations discussing Drupal’s future and watch live discussions at the Day Stage. In sum, visitors could choose between 78 sessions. All of them (AFAIK) were recorded and the A/V team managed to put the recordings online within impressively short time.

I’m proud to have given two sessions myself: “ Simple devops workflows with Kanban” and “ Use datacenter tools to make your dev life easier”. I’m going to write some blog posts following up these sessions soon.

Speaker support by the DrupalCon team had been impressivly intense. Not only did they make sure that the speakers finish their materials in time but they also offered several webinars to help the speakers ramp up their presentation skills. The quality of the sessions I visited was quite mixed, though, and many people I spoke to wished for more pro-level topics. I think it’s a reasonable demand that DrupalCon sessions meet a higher standard than those at local DrupalCamps.

On the vendor show floors, most companies had chosen the dull and boring approach of having a more or less sophisticated booth where people handed out stuff and talked to visitors. Two of the few notable exceptions were propeople with their giant Jenga tower of Drupal components and Comm-Press who handed out T-shirts with QR codes that matched in pairs. Those who made the effort to find the Drupalista wearing the matching shirt could win an iPad or tickets for next year’s DrupalCon Portland.

There was a lot of buzz about the merger announcement of four well-known Drupal shops. Like everyone else, I was amazed that this made them the world’s biggest Drupal development business and surprised that they chose to keep the name of the smallest business, the german “Wunderkraut” (which translates, unbeknownst to many, as “wonder herb”). Looking back on my experience with big mergers, I wish them best of luck with the challenges they’re facing, especially the essential task of building a common company culture.

I’d like to end with shout outs to some people I enjoyed spending time with: Gerhard and Kris – thanks for having me on the DevOps track and for all the support! Micha, Thomas, Jan – thanks for a great evening with Pizza and late desserts! Barry and Josh – I had a lot of fun with my fellow Drupal hosting experts at the DevOps Meetup Munich and in the English Garden!

And finally, a big Thank You to the Drupal Association for organizing such a great event! I’m already looking forward to the next DrupalCon!