My experience attending DrupalCamp Colorado 2024

Last week on Thursday and Friday 7/25-26, I attended DrupalCamp Colorado 2024 at the Auraria Campus in Denver, CO, a two-day conference focused on the Drupal CMS. One notable thing about DrupalCamp in Colorado is that it's a free event and open to all (once registered), thanks to multiple corporate sponsors that include Elevated Third and Aten Design Group, both of which are local agencies in Denver that work primarily in Drupal to provide website and web application development. While this was my first experience at DrupalCamp, I've attended other tech conferences in the past such as ElixirConf and UberConf (both back in 2019), so I had a general idea of what to expect going in.

While attending any conference can be an intimidating experience for a lot of people, and it certainly was for me, one of the biggest things I took away from my experience attending DrupalCamp was how open and welcoming everyone was, from the volunteers working at the registration table, to the variety of industry professionals that I met and spoke with, to the speakers, and even the corporate sponsors (i.e. Applura). It also felt very intimate since it wasn't a hugely-attended conference (I'd guess between 80-100 people?), which I really appreciated as it allowed for small-scale sessions that ranged from about 10 to 40 attendees. I was able to connect with quite a few individual people, and I suppose you never know who you're going to meet at a conference, but I can certainly say it stood out that everyone I met was super friendly and gave me an incredibly positive impression of the larger Drupal community as well.

One of my biggest goals going into DrupalCamp was to learn more about the Drupal CMS after working with it for the first time in a relatively recent role (I did Drupal site administration fairly heavily, built a small number of themes and modules, and developed a front-end application coupled to a headless Drupal back-end), and at the conference I was thankful to get a very good broad exposure to a variety of topics that included contributing to Drupal and some of the areas that need help on Drupal.org (the official community website), managed cloud hosting, management of digital projects, and using GitHub Actions with the CMS. Another thing that I wasn't expecting but was incredibly grateful for was the opportunity to be in an "open sharing" session where a variety of industry professionals spoke about their experience in the community and their takeaways from the conference up until that point (this was towards the end of the second day). It was insightful to hear about people's experiences in the industry and the community, and made me realize that despite its age of 23 years now, Drupal is still a very exciting technology with a lot of potential still in its tank, and that the community is very much alive and full of energy and lots of enthusiastic people!

I would absolutely attend next year's DrupalCamp Colorado based on my experience at this year's, and now I'm more excited than ever to get more involved in the community. And if, like me, you happen to be interested in learning Drupal (whether for the first time or to get deeper into it like I'm looking to do), I heard from folks at the conference that the best resources to learn Drupal are Drupalize.me (has a mix of free and paid content) and Acquia Academy (their Community platform is free).