Drupalcon Pittsburgh 2023

Drupalcon Pittsburgh 2023

June 3rd, Edouard and I (Pierre Paul) took the road to Pittsburgh and making a spending the night in Toronto. 10-14 hours drive is no joke, so stopping in Toronto to meet some other Fixrs was a good idea to take a break. It was my first time in Toronto in the last 5-10 years, but also my first time visiting the city itself, instead of the attractions. It was fun to visit the city, but also a bit sad to see so many homeless people. With the housing prices just going up in the last years, everywhere in Canada, more and more people will have issues to find a roof. This is of course not limited to Canada and the big cities, but Vancouver/Toronto/Montreal sure have a bigger share of the issue nowadays, in Canada at least.

Sunday morning we were back on the road, for the last leg of the trip. After a few more Tim Hortons, borders that took way too much time and without much surprises, we were in Pittsburgh. The convention center was great, huge and the architects definitely poured a lot of love into it.

The sessions

There was so many great sessions! Also, so many great sessions at the same time. It was great; it was jam packed. The schedule, from someone not used to Drupalcon (my last one was in Portland, 10 years ago), was weird. It took me some time, to be honest, to understand most of the sessions were actually spread out on two days instead of four. The last two days was reserved to open source contributions and what they call Summits.

Summits are (with a fee added on top of the conference ticket) sessions/meeting place for people working in the same industry (education, government, etc.). There's also a free open-source summit, with sessions like how to help spreading the Drupal love around, but at this point I was more interested in contributing code than listening to those sessions.

According to the numbers I saw, we were around 1500 people from around the world, talking and listening about Drupal. Lunch was provided, cold sandwich with salads every day. I think I was a bit spoiled at Confoo at the beginning of the year with hot food.

The parties

There was official and unofficial parties every day. We're not really party goers, but if that's your thing, you will like it. Sessions started late after the first day to account for that, which is a bit of a shame. Like, the keynote "Women in tech and tech leadership Today" ended up being at the same time as lunch (which physically happened at the other side of the building). To me, that's poor planning.

The energy

A great thing about the Drupalcon though, was the energy and innovative ideas being thrown around all the time. There is so many great initiatives trying so hard to push Drupal further, it's amazing. I'm sure by now you've already seen all the reports from the Drupalcon, if that's your thing, but just to name a few, SDC (single directory components), revamped Fields API at the database level, Project browser, automatic updates, etc. It was really fun to see the actual people being the initiatives and the modules we use every day. I ended up contributing to a drush 12 + SDC integration on contribution day.

The road back

Edouard took the plane back, but I decided I would hit the road back on the next Saturday. I did my best (and succeeded) to take roads that had no tolls. If you want my opinion, it's not worth it. There's a big difference between 10 hours and 14 hours. No toll and 14 hours ride isn't worth it, compared to 10 hours and tolls. The road was beautiful. The rest stop plenty (I really had to take a nap to some of them). Almost no waiting time at the small border patrol, but 14 hours is a lot. At least the AC was working!

Next year?

I'm definitely trying to get to Drupalcon next year as well. The next one in America is supposed to be Portland. I will probably skip that one and try to go to the one in Europe, wherever it might be. It would be my first conference outside the US/Canada, so I'm really looking forward to that.