On Friday, May 12, 2023, the Unperfekthaus, an oasis of creativity in the heart of Essen, opened its doors to the Drupalistas. The event opened with the entire fourth floor and the roof terrace as the venue. Upon registration, each participant was given a stylish gym bag with the DrupalCamp logo, stickers and an optional T-shirt.
Nicolai Schwarz then introduced the participants to the program for the next two days.
Based on the barcamp concept, participants presented their prepared or spontaneous session ideas. I was also represented this time with a session for our Drupal agency arocom: "Sitebuilding with Drupal 9/10 - How to get started easily". As beginner sessions are usually in short supply at Drupal events, we made a conscious decision to do this.
After scheduling the sessions and the obligatory group photo, we could finally get started.
Entry-level topics are in demand
The beginner topics were sorted at the beginning. Mark Engelhardt started with a 90-minute overview of Drupal 10, followed by my session on technologies and the development environment. As a site builder, you usually only use the CMS you are using. However, Drupal also uses a variety of technologies to work smoothly and efficiently, some of which should also be known and used. Getting started with these tools is often difficult. From my many years of experience, some of it painful, I was able to give a lot of tips on these topics.
The response to both beginner sessions was much greater than initially expected. This has encouraged us here at arocom to continue working in this area.
Diverse sessions and lots of impressions
In addition to the beginner sessions, there were of course a large number of other sessions and workshops that were held this weekend on a wide variety of topics. For example Drupal Commerce, Responsive Images, Drupal 10.1, Drupal.org, Single Directory Components (SDC) and many more.
It is always nice to see that the Drupal 7 fork "Backdrop CMS" is still present at Drupal events. And so there was also a session on it.
One of the highlights on Friday evening was the almost legendary nerd quiz by Nicolai Schwarz, in which he combined Drupal-specific questions with questions from the fields of world literature, games, geography and many more.
Saturday again offered a lot of exciting sessions and spontaneous bofs, which made for a productive end to the weekend.
Conclusion
All in all, it was an outstanding event that fulfilled all expectations after the long Corona drought and made us want more. Many thanks from our side to the entire organizing team and the hospitality. We will definitely be back!
Outlook
In the future, we would also like to contribute with our sponsorship to ensure that these events can continue to be realized for the German Drupal community. So we also support the Drupal Camping in Wolfsburg (15.-18.6.2023), which our colleague Boris Böhne (drubb) is co-organizing.
We would also like to draw your attention to the arocom Co-Working Day 2023, which will take place on 10.11.2023.
