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There's no easy way to put this but as of this post I'm withdrawing from organising DrupalCamp NW 2013.
A lot of things have changed over the past 4 months some good some not so. I intend to spend as much time with my friends and family and avoid the stress of organising the event.
Where does this leave the event? Pretty much in the same place as it was a few months ago, I'd love for more people to step up and take charge of the event. Nothing would make me happier than attending DCNW 2013 as an attendee for a change! Hell I might actually see some sessions.
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As a developer it's in my best interest to keep up to date with the current technologies and techniques industry leaders are using. Over the past few years I've been signed up to many lists from companies that provide webinars.
As part of my increased like of agile development and the control it gives you over your estimates and deliverables I've become increasingly aware of the horrible fact our code coverage sucks. There's no real way to sugar coat it we don't do proper testing, it's bugged me for years.
This is hopefully going to be the one of the first of many posts going through the motions of organising DrupalCamp NW 2013 or project "WTF are you doing???"
The full title of this post is "We went big, now to go bigger". What do I mean by this? Well for start 2012 was amazing the fact that we managed to pull it off and provide such a great event means that we have a lot of work to do. So what next? Well...
The following was written and unedited on 13th March 2013 the day after my Grandma died.
Death is never an easy subject to tackle, it's something that everyone must face in their own time. Whether it be a close relative or friend death happens and you can't avoid that.
What perplexes me is why death is such a taboo subject, gone are the days when the thought of it used to paralyze me with fear.
I'm on a train heading back from drupal camp London, after a great weekend it got me thinking what is a camp and where do you draw the line?
With over 300 sign ups its rumoured to be one (if not) largest camps in the Europe. At what point so you say it was a conference? The Saturday saw 5 tracks (3 more than NW) with talks lasting 30 minutes. I'm inclined to say that the original idea of a camp has grown way bigger than expected as the rise in drupals popularity has increased.
Here are some really handy tools for when you have to deal with Drupals admin interface
Autofill - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detai...
Automatically fill out forms, great for testing node/add forms with specific sets of data, can store profiles for use on multiple sites.
Edit This Cookie - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detai...
After taking a whole 24 hours away from anything DrupalCamp NW related I now feel relaxed and chilled enough to write this.
Over the past few months a team of 4 people have spent every waking second organising DrupalCamp NW - Steph Hosny, Philip Norton and Paul Johnson. Our aim was to create an event that the Drupal community would enjoy and learn from. I feel we've succeeded 110% in this.
I never really finished my first Drupalcamp Retrospective post, I missed out a vital point as to why I do what I do now.
One of the speakers for the day was Robert Douglass, I think he'd just joined Acquia for the first time and was giving a talk on his Apache Solr module. When the talk started he gave a brief intro to Acquia and left it at that (something Acquia could learn from all these years later, I'm looking at you webinar team), he then proceeded to spend well over an hour and twenty minutes talking very passionately about the module he'd been working on.