Latest thoughts, if any, of Rachel Lawson...

Having had the joy of experiencing organised events etc from both sides of the coin, as a participant and as an organiser, I have had ample opportunity to notice one thing — people in open source communities can do one thing that makes the experience of organising so much more pleasant: commit early.

I see again and again organisers of conferences, from small meet-ups even up to DrupalCon itself, worrying whether people will buy the tickets they need for the event to be a success, right up until the last few weeks (and days!)

I need to have a little bit of surgery done on Monday. No big deal.

However, to have the surgery I need to have a COVID-19 test (exactly) 72 hours beforehand. No problem, I think. How wrong I was…

Having just called the 119 telephone number to book a test, I've just been told that there are two options:

For the last few years, I have made it a little tradition of mine to use the motorbike to get to as many DrupalCon events as possible, certainly all the European ones and I even had thoughts of how to do this for Minneapolis this year. 

Of course, 2020 came along and everything changed. Still, given DrupalCon is a "high intensity" time in Drupal Association staff's calendars, I knew spending a few days riding after DrupalCon Global 2020 was definitely a good idea.

The huge, huge advantage of using an off-the-shelf, soon-to-be-core theme is that the quality is high, like really high. 

Of course, there is always a possibility I would want to add something (and I have an idea for a little animation in the back of my mind) so I wanted to find a way to do that without making any changes to the actual theme.

When Lewis Nyman tweeted about a funky little way to add a "dark mode", I saw my opportunity...

A whole team have people are working on a new default theme for Drupal 9, to be introduced in version 9.1, called "Olivero" and I think it is so beautiful, it finally prompted me to make a blog for myself simply so I could use it!

Well, to be honest, I do rather like the default content we make on Drupal 9 site install these days:

As Community Liaison, I find it important to liaise face-to-face whenever I can, and an opportunity presented itself to visit a community I have not been able to spend time with until now; that in India.

This was going to not only be the first time I’ve worked with the community in India but also my first time in India. I couldn’t help but wonder, “Will I see any elephants?”

After spending a great Saturday at @nwdug’s Unconference in Manchester at the weekend, I found myself reflecting upon what actually makes a great Drupal Camp.

I’m going to keep saying this — these are my personal thoughts — not those of my employer.

2017 has been a really interesting year for me in our lovely Drupal community. I think I have learned (or realised that I have yet to fully learn) a few lessons that have helped me along the way.

I want to just list them for the time being and then come back to each one over a few weeks to go into detail about what they mean to me.

So, this year (or maybe the last couple of years) I realised:

I am happy to see that many people are doing a really good job of writing up about what happened at DrupalCon Vienna 2017. I can’t do a better job than that already done so I’m going to try and take a different approach and talk about how all the things that happened made me feel. Buckle-up, this might get emotional…