Hey everyone! It’s been almost 2 weeks since the latest updates to our blog on the life of the Drucode team. We’re back now- full of energy and desire to continue great work. Hope you’ve been following some of Drucode’s news and updates on Google+ and Twitter, then you might know what is the reason for our slow blog activity. If not - in this post you’ll find out about Drucode’s trip to Prague, Berlin and our new teammate from Germany. So let’s start!
As you may have read before, we have been attending DrupalCon 2013 that took place in a beautiful city of Prague this year. This wasn’t a first DrupalCon Drucode attended, but it was a special one to us. Not only because we decided to travel 1800 km by car... but also because we were lucky enough to be the Gold sponsors of such a great event for the first time in our 2-year history.
In any case I’ll start from the very beginning. And eventually it all started here - with a surprize e-mail from Arthur:
We all were excited. At the same time we knew, we would need to settle many organizational issues. A lot work awaited for us in foreseeable future to represent our team on a decent level in Prague. We had to solve visa issues (which is such a terrible pain here, in Ukraine), logistics for five people travelling to Prague (it IS a big deal, when it comes to busy team of 10 people overall), design promo materials, launch marketing campaign and our new, long-awaited website...For us, who work full-time on other projects it was a challenge. But what I adore about individuals working here, at Drucode, is that they gladly accept every new challenge. This was the case with preparation to DrupalCon: we knew, we’ll make it work.
It all started with an fascinating process of creating our first serious branding materials. We never did it for ourselves.
One thing was helping us throughout the entire process: we knew we had something to tell. We knew what it was, as we have always paid big attention to developing our team philosophy. But when you ask me what was the hardest task - I would have an answer for you right away: making the message run through every single line we wrote. And do it in non-native language. Well, I believe we succeeded. Still there’s a lot room for improvement, but we constantly work on it. Results of our work see below:
When it all was set up - we hit the road. It all began with picking our route. It looked, like a long to go, but we knew it is going to be fun.
The customs control, road, weather - everything went well for us and very quickly we were already in the beautiful city of Krakow. There we stopped for a dinner and some sightseeing. And, eventually, got lost in the middle of the night… Well, 2 hours of walking weren’t that bad, considering Krakow is a beautiful city =) And Max is enough of an IT person to have his offline-map GPS with him all the time. So once we found our car, it was 10PM already and we decided to make a night move to Prague.
With few more stops, detours because of highway construction works, it took us 8 more hours of travelling. We made it to Prague on Sunday, after 16-hour trip. It was time to find the apartment we rented. This wasn’t hard, as we rented one, not far from the Prague Congress Center (venue of DrupalCon).
What did we do next? Had some beer? Enjoyed beautiful Prague? Went for a dinner? Nuh! Instead, we...were launching our new website. Yep. Something you do in Prague on a Sunday night. That day we stayed up late.
Next morning with a website launched, plenty of rest and new Drucode t-shirts on - we were locked and loaded for the DrupalCon!
On the way to Prague Congress Centre, where the conference took place
3 tram stops, 4 subway stops, and then walk...It looks like we had to be travelling half of Prague to get to DrupalCon? Well, not really. It was taking us less than 20 minutes to be get from our apartment to the Congress Hall. Prague made an impression of an quite, calm city, And the public transportation is great.
You must be tired of reading all this. So here is the good news: we finally made it to the Conference! Now it’s time to see what you came here for: some DrupalCon photos and impressions.
As usual, Dries was giving an opening keynote.
And of course the group photo right after Dries’ presentation: “Everybody! Point at Dries!”...So everyone did =)
Sessions started. We began work at Drucode’s booth. Conference went full-speed.
Photo by Josef Jerabek
One of the brightest moments, that DrupalCon brought us, was that we were able to find new teammate! Meet Victor from Germany:
A freshly baked Drucoder. I bet, you’ll hear about “Drucode Germany” soon ;-)
Few words on organization and sessions: DrupalCon as always a place to be, if you’re a Drupal developer. The one in Prague was no exception. 1830 attendees this year, the most for European DrupalCon. Taking this into account, we would like to thank Prague Team for great job of organizing an event. There were some issues with Internet, but those were fixed quickly. In general, the event left us only with best impressions.
The conference gave us an opportunity to meet tons of great people, learn from many and share our own knowledge with others. This is always inspiring.
One of my favorite sessions this year was a Keynote given by Aral Balkan on the topic of “Experience Driven Open Source”. The conversation went well beyond the topic, for good. Anyone, interested in UI, design, data protection and privacy should definitely check it out.
If you want, to have a better understanding of what the event was like, go to to official DrupalCon Prague image gallery on Flickr. It’s an awesome result of community members putting all DrupalCon photos in one place.
Also you may find videos of recored sessions here.
Some interesting videos can also be found at Drupal Assciation YouTube channel. Like those, where Dries was serenaded by a choir of carrots or a ‘Group photo time lapse’.
In Prague we stayed for 5 days instead of 7, as initially planned. We decided to seize the opportunity and visit our partners is Germany. Thus on Friday morning we headed to Berlin. There are a lot of things I’d like to tell you about our trip to Berlin, but I’ll throw in few photos, instead of thousands words. The city of Berlin is way different than Prague is. It has it’s own, urban charm. The city, that never sleeps.
As a conclusion, I can only say it was a wonderful trip for us. So many things we’d like to share with you, and these will come in upcoming posts. We’ll tell you about the process of making our new website, Agile practises we have adopted, continuous integration in Drupal and more. So stay tuned!