I attended COSSFEST 2009 one week ago. Calgary as it turns out has an active opensource community for its size and the current president of KDE lives there!! I was the only person there who is actively involved in the Drupal community and earning a living from Drupal. However may of the developers were using Drupal in one way or another so I felt at home. In some ways it was bit strange mixing with people active in other opensource projects rather than just hanging out with Drupal rockstars, but at the same time it was refreshing to see the mutual support across opensource projects.
The first day of the conference was spent tweaking my presentation, catching as many other sessions as possible and speaking to the volunteers and other presenters. The day ended with a social event which of course involved beer and lots of discussions about the world of opensource among other things.
Day 2 saw me take the stage and present on Building Web 2.0 Sites with Drupal. The majority of the session detailed what Drupal core offers and the concept of extensibility via contrib modules. This included a demo showing what could be done without writing a single line of custom code. The remainder of the session focused on custom modules, the concept of theming and what Drupal 7 will bring. There were about 30 people in audience, many of whom left with an interest in finding out more about Drupal. My slides and a copy of the code and database can be found attached to this post (username admin password 1).
Once my presentation was over I was able to relax and enjoy the rest of the day before saying good bye to everyone and heading back home. A video of the presentation should be available shortly, and when it is I'll let everyone know where to find it.
After the fun I had this year I can’t wait to attend next years COSSFEST.
