DrupalCon New Orleans Schedule and Preview

I'll be heading to DrupalCon in New Orleans next week and as I am planning what sessions I am going to attend I figured I'd post here what sessions I'm going to and why. This will be 5th DrupalCon North America event. I always struggle between focusing on the business stuff, or the code stuff, and balancing between practical coding stuff or cool new technologies I just want to see. There are lots of good sessions and often more than one great session happening at the same time so deciding can be tough.

Last year I did the Business Summit and loved it. This year Dagny will attend the Business Summit while I will checkout the new Government Summit.

I have been working on using Drupal with Amazon Web Services so several of the sessions and/or BOFs on that topic jumped out at me. I also believe we will see more use of Drupal as a pure content management system so several of the containerizing, micro-services, and sessions relating to using Drupal as more of a back-end only system also look interesting. Unfortunately I can't go to all of them, but luckily I can always stream them later.

Tuesday, is the busiest day with the most hard decisions. After the Keynotes and group photo I want to attend the Next-level Drupal: Applied progressive decoupling with JavaScript session but there is also a Static Sites BOF that I will probably attend instead. I'm in the same boat after lunch only with two BOFs I want to attend, one on Drupal for SPAs and the others is on Teaching Drupal to Kids. There is a session that afternoon that looks really interesting too on Impostor Syndrome. I'll have to catch that one on video though since I'll go to the BOFs instead. Then I am going to attend the Symfony Event Dispatcher session. I have not used events in Drupal or Laravel yet but I understand it's a powerful tool I should know. Then I'm going to attend the session on building a distributed team and then go see Gábor and Angie's session on the potential of Drupal 8 which will cover the new Drupal minor-revision system and experimental modules.

Tuesday night Dagny and I will attend the Women in Drupal event and are proud to have Digital Ambit sponsoring the event.

Wednesday is less cluttered and I plan on attending Fabian's session on the future of Drupal, a session on Drupal as a platform for the government, a business track session on implementing performance metrics, and then a BOF on Drupal and Amazon Web Services. The last session of the day is on using Pantheon for development. I always use local development environments so it'll be interesting to hear a pitch on using a cloud environment for development. And, of course, I'll be at the Pantheon after party as well.

On Thursday the conference ends early so it has fewer sessions. I'll attend the session on BigPipe, Zivtech's session on training your own staff and then I really have a tough decision between a session on contrib's commercian horizon and the State of Drupal session. I'll probably do the Contrib one and catch the other on the videos.

Friday I plan on attending the sprints and hope I can contribute something this year.