Been Camping it up!
I have had the great opportunity to attend several web dev related camps over the last several months. The 1st of these was DrupalCamp Asheville - hosted in beautiful western North Carolina. This was a very successful camp with a really local/regional vibe, but also attracting some extra-local talent. Robert Ristroph of Four Kitchens came all the way from Austin and gave some great talks on Debuggin LAMP and DevOps techniques. Also had some of the Lullabot crew come out. Including Addison Berry all the way from Denmark, who presented an excellent keynote to start the day off. Overall I felt this was a very successful camp. Big thanks to all those who volunteered and to Mathew Connerton for organizing it.
At the beginning of October I was able to attend a weekend in Atlanta, GA for Atlanta's 1st Drupal Business Summit, and for DrupalCamp Atlanata. The Biz summit was an interesting day geared towards those on the business side of things, and why it is wise for business to choose Drupal as a platform to build on. It was very interesting to different perspectives on Drupal and hear some concerns from those at large companies who are evaluating it as a CMS. The next day at the camp went off very well. I have been to quite a few DrupalCamp's to date, and this one might have been my favorite thus far. It was very well organized - big thanks to the crew at Mediacurrent and the Altanta Drupal User's Group for putting it on. The event had a great vibe overall through the day. At this camp I was able to present a session on Sass, a tool to aid in more rapid and efficient CSS development. This topic seemed to get some great enthusiasm overall. The room was nearly full and I got some great questions and feedback from attendees. Another nice highlight of the day was a Birds of a Feather (BoF) I took part in on Ajax in Drupal. The BoF was largely driven by Evan Willhite, an excellent Front End Dev who's doing some really nice stuff with JavaScript in Drupal. I had been bothering Evan over twitter about some of his work, it was great to meet and ask questions in person. He even wrote a follow up blog post that goes over a lot that we talked over in the BoF. Really cool stuff that I look forward to implementing in future projects. Overall, Atlanta was a really great camp and and is a perfect example awesome ways the Drupal community can come together.
Most recently I had a chance to be a part of a first time event for me, called GiveCamp, Charlotte. GiveCamp is an event that takes place in different parts of the country where Web Developers get together for a weekend, split if into teams, and each team builds a site for a non-profit. Oh, and have the sites done by the end of the weekend! Needless to say that with the power of Drupal, the team I was on did excellent. We were able to build a site for Langford Chapel. A church that had no existing web presence before the weekend. They were a great non-profit to work with and kept right with our team through the whole process. The event was hosted at Microsoft's offices here in Charlotte. I am not historically a fan of Microsoft overall, but I think it was really awesome that they were willing to host this camp. At the end of the weekend. My team and I had completed a fully functional church site which you can check out at: http://langfordchapel.org . Very productive weekend and I look forward to taking part in another GiveCamp in the future.