Last year I went to Drupalcon 2008 in Boston. I had been working with Drupal for a little over half a year, but it still hadn't really clicked. That trip was very educational for me, and I learned a lot about not just Drupal, but networking in general as well.

I have many reasons for attending Drupalcon this year. The standard "learning about topic X" reasons are all valid, but mostly secondary. This year I'm looking for a job. I graduate from Bradley this May with a BS in Multimedia. That entitles me to do so many different ranges of things that it's a little daunting to think about. Fortunately with my focus on Drupal and Flash (for the last several years) I feel like I have a place I could fit in and really enjoy myself. Having an opportunity to work in the field over the past year has helped me realize that this is what I would feel comfortable doing full time. The big question is where.

I'm not picky about where I'll be working. I'm willing to move anywhere in the world (sorry Mom!) and I'm hoping that will make me an attractive candidate. I'm not even very picky about who I work for so long as they are a morally upstanding company that respects their customers and employees. I'll admit that I'd like to work with Lullabot (who wouldn't??) and my experience teaching Drupal every week is a plus, but I'm definitely not at their caliber yet. I'm hoping that working in Drupal full time (without simultaneously being a full time student) will give me the opportunity to spend a lot more time giving back to the community and get some experience that can help me make a name for myself.

Pre-Registration

Amanda and I figured we'd be done doing touristy stuff by Tuesday and felt like giving back to the Drupal community, so we decided to volunteer to help get things set up. We arrived at about noon, but they didn't really have anything for us to do because they were waiting for packages to arrive and other things to fall into place. So they told us to leave and come back at about 3:30.

We ended up arriving at 3 and they happened to have an emergency we could help with. Drupalcon had some really sweet window clings made to go on all of the doors in the Washington Convention Center. Unfortunately, it was very cold outside and most of the clings started un-clinging and curling around the edges. We were not allowed to use tape (and decided it was too tacky anyway) but someone had some bright ideas for other things to try. We did some experiments with water and windex, but windex seemed to give us the best results. Amanda and I spent the next several hours going to just about every door in the convention center, applying windex, applying clings, and working out the bubbles and curling edges with rulers. It worked exceedingly well, and we received several compliments about how well they looked. I guess if I'm not able to find a job doing Drupal I made a good impression with my ability to apply window clings to cold doors.

We went to register and got our sweet Drupal shirts, plus a shirt from Acquia and a sweet under the table secret shirt from the awesome guys at Ubercart & Commerce Guys. By this time, the Tree House Agency guys had arrived and Amanda and I were able to meet up with our ex-prof Steven 'Sven' Merrill. We were pretty much done helping the Drupalcon folks, so we decided to help out the Tree House Agency guys get their awesome wood blocks give-away swag set up.

The blocks of wood were inside these ~1,300 spiffy hand stamped, hand folded, hand stuffed boxes.

Once pre-reg was over, everyone started heading to a local place for food and drinks. We got our own private room for Drupalcon... but it was a little small. Most of the space was standing room only, and groups of us were overflowing into their main restaurant area.

A little later Amanda and I heard that Sven and the rest of the Tree House Agency were at another place a few blocks up - as was Brian McMurray (another ex-prof who now works at MIT) and his coworker Steve Pomeroy who I met when I visited MIT last fall. We headed there and hung out with them for an hour or so before heading back to the main place again. It was around midnight by this point, and the place was still full of Drupal people.

Little did I know, however, that the city train system shuts down at midnight. It is probably possible to get back home via bus, but not very plausible at 1am with the distance I had to cover. Unfortunately that meant I had to get a taxi. I'm pretty sure my driver knew I was a tourist and took me the long way on purpose. It felt VERY long, and it didn't seem very direct at all. We took a lot of back streets that might have made sense during busy rush hour traffic, but there was no one else on the road.

He dropped my off near the train station I usually get off at to head to Chris', but unfortunately the American University shuttle that took me to his place also stopped at midnight (go figure). I thought I knew where I was going, so I started walking in the direction of his place. A good 30 min later or so, when I didn't recognize anything, I decided I should prolly call a taxi again. I got another taxi who took me to where the shuttle normally drops me off at, and I was able to walk the rest of the way. My taxi bill for that night was about $18. Ugh. On the up side, I wandered across a random Fallout 3 poster in a bus shelter (Fallout 3 is set in the Capital Wasteland):

Free Swag for Pre-Reg:

• 4 t-shirts (Drupalcon DC, Ubercart, Acquia, Tree House Agency))
• Swag Bag
• Many stickers, cards, name tag
• Left over window cling
• Large block of wood